A Town In The Mountains
by mimirshead
Summary: Reiner had always expected to wake up one day, transformed by puberty, have the wool lifted suddenly from his eyes, and find Annie undeniably, horrifyingly attractive. He had expected to fall head over heels in love with her in the sort of passionate, animalistic way his parents were in love. That was clearly not how it had happened.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: Some context, because it's important here considering nothing much is explained. This is pretty much a werewolf AU. And the point of this was playing with a fictional society, and a relationship between Bert, and Reiner. It's set in modern day America in the Blue Ridge mountains in Georgia where a village of werewolves have set up a small, isolationist society. This explores some of the societal norms, and the way that they make life hard on Reiner as he comes to terms with the fact that he's in love with Bertholdt. Most of the notions here are based on the idea that this is an endangered species that is holding on at the edge of extinction due to being hunted, making it very important to settle down, and have a family. Also an important thing, Love, and Romance are seen as animalistic, as there is some deep set resentment for humans engrained in the way they live, meaning they put a higher value on "baser" things. Of course that does not mean that they are without tenderness.

* * *

He noticed that it was more than friendship when he turned thirteen, and playing doctor was suddenly awkward. It was all the same stuff they'd always done as kids, but then things were off.

Bert prescribed him a kiss, and he'd liked it a little too much. It wasn't really odd for two guys to kiss, so he hadn't thought about it. Their whole life they'd seen their fathers kiss in greeting. Kissing was a friendship thing.

Or it had been until Bert's mouth was on his, and Reiner didn't want to let him go because something about the way their lips brushed up against each other had gone straight to his head, making it fuzzy. Kissing was a friendship thing.

How often did they see their mother's kiss their fathers? Rarely if ever, and only when they were being friendly.

Biting was romantic. Nipping hard at ear lobes, and leaving bruises on shoulders. That was romance. That was the romance they had been raised to crave their whole lives. But suddenly friendship was making him want to bite, and hold down, and make bleed.

Suddenly friendship felt like a precursor to romance.

"Are you okay?" Bert asked when he looked at the shocked expression on his face. "Reiner?"

That night, when he'd touched himself he'd thought of Bert, and then wondered if it was alright to fuck guys the same way it was alright to kiss them. Maybe, he thought, just so long as it was gentle, like friends, it wouldn't be too bad.

Not that it would ever happen. They'd probably both have girlfriends before it came to that.

The village was a sprawl up in the mountains. Hardly any of them were anything that could be call close enough to be neighbors. Bert and Annie lived within a mile of Reiner's house though. They'd been raised together all their lives. They were best friends, and confidants. A pack of the next generation.

Bert, and Annie were the only other kids Reiner saw most of the time. Unless it was a special occasion. Something like town meeting, or a holiday.

He'd listened, for years, to overheard plans his parents discussed for him to marry Annie. He'd been of the belief all his life that it would be Annie. She was the perfect wife. The perfect political move for their family. Her parents were old traditionalists that had only just stopped sneering that the fact that the Hoovers had an old pick-up truck. They were well respected.

Reiner had always expected to wake up one day, transformed by puberty, have the wool lifted suddenly from his eyes, and find Annie undeniably, horrifyingly attractive. He had expected to fall head over heels in love with her in the sort of passionate, animalistic way his parents were in love. The way that hurt physically until their bodies burned away the tears. The way that made people scream in the night. The way people told stories about, where a man and a woman went on a hunt, and bathed in the blood of their kill before taking one another like the beasts they hunted.

That was clearly not how it had happened. Reiner was thirteen, and puberty was doing all the things that puberty did. Only instead of Annie, it was Bert, and looking at it, it wasn't that much of a surprise at all.

When they were five, Reiner had remembered suddenly that Bertholdt's favorite flowers were the ones that grew up at the top of the ridge past where the coyotes roamed, and so he'd gone, and gotten them. When they were nine they'd started diagnosing fake illnesses with kisses in games of doctor, something Reiner had started. When they were eleven Reiner had been fascinated by the fact that their penises were different.

He couldn't see how he'd missed it before.

He tried to correct for damage, and dodge the bullet by avoiding the other boy. Which only made it worse, honestly, because then he was lonely. He gave that up after three days, and then tried the approach of just pretending nothing was wrong. He went back to sleeping at Bert's with semi regularity, and having him over just about as often.

They went back to sharing beds, and plates of food, and being friends. Tender, and caring, even when he wanted the harsh edges of love to cut into his flesh. He ignored it though. Ignored it when they curled up around each other, and Bert brushed unconsciously against sensitive areas.

He ignored it almost a full year. They were fourteen when he slipped up, and actually presented.

Necks. Necks were the center of heat, and passion. Stories told by village elders painted the necks of men, and women in vivid detail, bowing to the side to show trust to lovers, and mates.

Reiner bowed his neck without even thinking to question the action. It was too blatant really, something he only noticed when Bert's mouth was on him, and there were teeth digging into his skin, and by that point he was already baring his own teeth, and growling low in his throat, clutching at the other boy's shirt to pull him closer.

It was their first sexual interaction. Reiner tried desperately to keep the harsh edges out of it. He tried, and fought to keep it friendly, and soft, when they had their hands down each other's pants, and were begging with desperate, incoherent sounds into one another's ears.

It was not romantic. It was experimentation. His mother had told him that that was alright. Children would be children, and certain things needed to be gotten out of the system. It was simply important that it wasn't spoken of.

The thing about belonging to an endangered species was that there was a desperate push for everyone to reproduce. Other than that, no one cared so long as it wasn't spoken of.

Reiner's real fear was that he'd never looked twice at a girl. He'd never looked twice at a girl, and yet he was spending his time learning all of the ins and outs of Bert's body, becoming adventurous with getting the other boy off.

It was fucked up.

What was more fucked up was the increasingly romantic way in which they handled things. There was a side to Bert that Reiner had never anticipated. One that allowed him to come away bleeding slightly with more, and more frequency.

They were six months shy of fifteen the night Bert said it. Four words. He said them, and Reiner had flown at him with all the passion their parents had told them about. Their bodies had been scored by their own claws, and they had bitten trenches in one another's shoulders. The sheets turned red, and stained by their frantic, and continuous movement as they rutted against each other's thighs, and groaned.

And then, they'd sat there in the aftermath, watching one another's wounds heal with wide eyes, and realized that this was going too far.

"We need to find girlfriends," Reiner said, and Bert nodded.

They needed to get over this phase. They needed to stop pretending that it was love. Clearly it was a substitute.

"I call Annie!" Bert said loudly, and Reiner punched him in the arm.

"Not fair. Annie, and I are the ones who are supposed to be gettin' married!"

"Very fair. You can actually talk to girls. I'm only ever able to talk to Annie."

They were half a year from coming of age. Their fathers were taking them out on their first hunts, and preparing them. They didn't have much time to develop relationships, and yet it had never been more pertinent.

Reiner met Hilde properly when they ran into her over the caracas of a deer both of their fathers had put bullets into. She was fierce, and nothing like Bertholdt, and so Reiner had assumed she would be a safe bet, a good distraction. Flirting was simple enough. It was like talking. Like joking, and he'd always been told he was funny.

He threw in a few good cocks of the head, slight hints of presenting, and received them in return. That's where his father found them. He looked at Reiner who was gaining slow, but sure custody of the doe with something like exasperated pride.

Hilde had been there the next day when Reiner had been tasked with scaring up some pheasants, and pulled the stunt of snatching one of mid air one handed. It was pretty much a securement of his position as a potential suitor. All he needed to catch her interest.

Much to his father's half hearted chagrin, he, and Hilde courted one another in the proper way for about a week before they began to properly date.

They chased one another, and snarled playfully, waiting for full moon nights to skip home, and meet in fields. It was classic, and yet when he was kissing her, he was thinking about Bert. He was thinking about four little words, and awkward admissions of thinking of one another when they were alone. About Bert's teeth deep in his skin, holding him still.

It made him angry. It made something horrible curl up in his stomach.

They started fighting. It was Reiner mostly. Reiner getting titchy, and snapping at the other boy. It was pushed from passive to active one day, when Bert's repeated attempts to gain his attention finally broke him down, and he stood up, violently throwing his fishing rod down.

"Stop fuckin' touchin' me!" he'd yelled, and pushed the other boy.

The ensuing scuffle had ended on the ground with Reiner's teeth on Bert's throat ready to rip when Annie lead their fathers to them. The knowing look on his father's face made Reiner want to vomit as Bert's dad helped him up, and dusted him off, and asked if he was alright.

Reiner was sent to his room for the rest of the day, and none of them caught any fish.

The second time they fought, it was Bert who threw the first punch, but it was Reiner who had called him a faggot.

That was two days before Hilde decided they should go all the way. Once again, it was the classic love story. She pushed him down, and mounted him with a snarl, nails digging hard into his chest outside under the stars, but he was still thinking about Bert. Bert's hands, and Bert's nails, and Bert's teeth.

He realized then, and there -as they reached a simultaneous orgasm that only made it more ludicrous that he wasn't happy- that he had made a huge mistake.

It wasn't a phase. He realized with crushing clarity as he kissed Hilde goodnight. They weren't going through some strange rebellion. It was what love felt like. Desperate, and stupid, and wonderful.

He climbed through Bert's window, and crawled into bed beside him.

"Bert?"

"Reiner?"

"I'm so sorry."

"What for," Bert asked, and that made Reiner fall in love with him just that much more because he should have known what for, but instead he was genuinely curious.

"I'm sorry I'm an asshole."

"You kind of are," Bert said with a soft laugh, and Reiner found his arms reaching out in the dark to pull him close because it had been two whole months since they'd touched without it hurting. It still hurt.

"I love you," he said when Bert was cradled against his chest. It hurt to say it. It hurt because all his life he'd been told love was some great thing that happened once in a life time. Something special, and sacred, given to them by the goddess of the moon. But this wasn't. This was something they couldn't have because they were already disappointing to their parents enough.

They would be exiled from their home, and sent down the mountain into the rest of the world with no life, and no papers, and no idea at all how to live.

"I slept with Hilde," Reiner said into the pillows, feeling the wet on his face. "I thought of you."

He was crying when Bert returned the sentiment. He was crying when Bert said, "I remember our first kiss," because he remembered it too. He cried harder when Bert said, "I remember the first time I noticed how much I liked you." He sobbed when Bert said, "I remember the first moment I knew it was love."

Bert's hands found his face. "Am I upsettin' you?"

"No," Reiner said, "It's just fucked up 'cause I don't know what to do. I love you, and that's supposed to be a good thing, but I hate myself for it."

"We could die together," Bert suggested. Reiner thought about the naive fourteen year olds that had been so much like them in Shakespeare. He shook his head vehemently. He didn't want to be that person. He didn't want to do what he'd always been told was quitting.

Maybe he was a coward, but death was too final for him. There were still hills, and grasslands to be explored. There was still a coming of age ceremony waiting for him in the hall of elders. There was still his chance to prove that he was a wolf to be feared. He was too young, and too unrealized. He didn't want to be Berik. He wasn't ready to follow yet.

Bert buried his face in Reiner's neck.

"We'll figure it out," Reiner said. "There's gotta be somethin' we can do. We can just live next to each other, and be best friends."

"Best friends," Bert said with a small laugh.

Reiner thought of their fathers. About what friendship looked like. About the occasional conversations his parents had about bite marks after he went hunting with Bert's dad. He felt like he'd looked too close at the wrong abstract picture.

"No one would ever have to know," Reiner told him, thinking about the look on his father's face when he, and Bert had fought the first time. "It would be our life, and no one would have to know."

Bert frowned, but nodded, because no matter how much they didn't like it, it was the way of the world. That was just how it was. These were the things no one spoke of.

Months passed. Reiner tried to distance himself more and more from Hilde. She was too small, and too sharp in her words. She was nothing to compliment him. He resented her for being more of a match in his parents' eyes than Bert would ever be.

His father turned disappointed eyes on him again after watching a verbal disagreement through the open back door of their house. Hilde was mad at his sudden disinterest. He told her to leave, pointed northwards to her house, and just shouted, "Get out," tendrils of his wolf prickling at the corners of his features. She had looked at him like she didn't know him, which- to be true- she didn't.

His father just shook his head when he came back in, and went back to helping with the dishes. There were no words exchanged. Just disappointment. Disappointment was the worst thing one would inspire in their parents. Everyone had always told them that.

When they were fifteen, the day after each of them had reached that milestone, and Annie had caught up, they went to the hall, and were given their bands. They were grown now. They were adults. Or mostly. There was still the hunting trip the three of them would undertake.

They would still have to bring home a bear, and present it's carcass to the town square, each of them undertaking a task in seeing it to the after life.

Reiner had been the one trained in skinning, and butchering. Bert had been the one set to cook the muscles in the fats. Annie had been the one trained to tan the hides and tendons, and bottle the oils for future uses.

They were sent out one week later with three tents, and three guns, three knives tucked into their three knapsacks sitting on top of three bedrolls. They were family, bonded by blood, and tears, and the loss of their fourth wheel back before they'd really been men, or women at all.

They set out on their own for the first time, and across their fire, Bert and Reiner stared at one another, realizing that it would soon be their time to trip for two years into the human world beneath the mountain. Beside him, Annie ripped a hunk of jerky into smaller strips, and handed them about.

"Just go, and fuck," She said softly. "I don't really care, and I'm not about to tell anyone about it."

They both looked at her with wide eyes, Reiner sputtering, and trying to deny everything.

"Honestly, I'm relieved," She said, biting off a bit of the jerky she'd kept for herself. "If you hadn't picked each other, you'd both be tryin' for me, and that's just too fuckin' weird. I mean, Bert tried to ask me out, and I couldn't look at him for three days. You're like my brothers, and I don't even want to have to think about your penises, so keep them to yourselves, and go have a fuck fest in one of the tents. Just be sure to keep it quiet so you don't scare off our game."

It all seemed hysterical in that moment. All that worry, and all that dread about someone knowing, when in the end they were family. They were packed up, and they had been since they were barely walking, back in the days when they'd drooled, and chewed on each other's ears, all rolled up into balls of mutual need for comfort.

Reiner stood up, and moved over to her, dropping down beside her. His arm was heavy around her tiny shoulders as he drew her up close to his body.

"I love you, Annie."

She looked at him as if he'd just sprouted wings, and flown to the moon.

"You're the best not-a-sister a guy could ever ask for."

Bert laughed when Annie tried to fight the hug. She was never really one for friendship, or friendly things. He joined in though, and they wrapped her up in a sandwich of mutual need for comfort, because the world was scary, and maybe they weren't really ready to be adults.

They all slept in the same tent that night, the three of them wound up around each other because they were family. They were closer with one another than they would ever be with anyone else. That was what it meant to be packed.

And the next morning when they woke with the sun, and dropped their tents, and strapped their packs to their backs to set out for tracking a bear, they did it together like they should. It made it a lot less scary. Reiner tried not to think of what it would come to if he and Bert had to leave then. Because Annie would likely stay, and the idea of being apart was the worst thing he could imagine.


	2. Chapter 2

His mother had told him stories growing up of how in days past werewolves had been the protectors of villages. Sacred individuals selected by the gods to stand watch outside homes, and move every moon as beasts that drove away death, and evil spirits.

A long time had passed since those days. Now they stood watch outside their own homes, watching for humans so they could drive them out. They held in their hands human made weapons, pump action rifles, and handguns, glaring from porches like old angry guard dogs because the humans had fucked up so badly.

Reiner took a deep breath, and stared out of the tree line at the town. It was similar in its construction to the center of their own, buildings more tightly packed perhaps, more well maintained because humans had more needs for the comforts of insulation.

This was the last step.

Bert made an odd whining sound beside him, and Annie answered back with a low grunt as if to agree with his discomfort.

If he had been there, it would have been Berik who took the first step, but he wasn't. Berik was long past the stomach of a grave mistake. That left it for Reiner, standing not so tall as Berik would have given the chance, it was his job to lead the pack into the den of those they had been told all their lives were death that breathed, and stared like fire.

They followed him, and for the first time he felt like he'd taken the reins as their momentary leader. It was Berik's position. It had been meant for him. In his absence, Reiner, and Annie had fought long and hard over the title. Perhaps they had just decided.

It was the beginning- the first calendar day- of their two years of ritual exilement. He made special note of it in his mind, and took hard to his oath of not returning until this day had come twice more.

Their temporary home lay before them in the most familiar building. A gas station shop with furs, and bone chimes hung out on the door jam, and in the windows. He made a line for it, checking the street for oncoming cars before trotting out into it.

His backpack was heavy on his shoulders filled with canned foods his mother had preserved for him. Pickled everything, and peaches shoved into syrup in jars. Annie's pack was the lightest. Her father had packed her a few sheets of dried deer, and rabbit, and not much else aside from tools to oil and repair their weapons.

He bowed through the door cautiously. The pack that had been running the shop had met their two years nearly three weeks ago, and left for home. They were here alone. The keys jingled in his hand as he slid them back into his pocket, and checked the register.

There was a small notebook of hand written instructions laying beside it. Their boon for how to run the shop, and keep up with the needs of customers. It explained the placement of their sleeping rooms, and how to properly stock the shelves.

He handed it to Bert, not wanting to bother with the reading. It wasn't his strong suit, and he often got the letters rearranged, but Bert was able to glance at a page, and come away enlightened. Annie shuffled her foot against the wooden floor, kicking up dust.

First order of business once they set down their things was cleaning. They would need to dust the neglect from the cans, and the jars, throw out anything that had spoiled while eyes were turned blind, and put everything back into working order. Then, when all of that was done, they would follow the instructions, learn how to operate the register, and count the inventory before turning the little sign on the door from Closed to Open.

Bertholdt took care of learning while they cleaned, and read labels, and threw things out. He sat on the stool behind the counter, feet braced on the bars above the ground, and flipped through the pages as if he were memorizing some ancient, and important text. Reiner paused every once in a while to chuckle at the look of concentration on his face.

After a while, when things were beginning to shape up inside, he stood up, bringing a couple of canned artichoke hearts with him toward the counter. He set them down with a smirk. "I'd like to buy these."

Bert grinned up at him, punched a few buttons on the register's face, and held out his hand when the door popped open.

Reiner took a moment to blink at him owlishly, before turning to Annie. "Bert's learned how to use the register."

"Good," she said, picking up a bucket of dirty mop water, and hauling it out the backdoor.

With everything done, they crawled back to the two bedrooms, and began properly laying out their things. Bert, and Reiner pushed their two beds together, and threw their own blankets and furs on top of the bare mattresses.

They took a moment to change their clothing, and sit in silence, staring out the high window in the wall. This place had none of the comforts of home aside from their pack. Reiner couldn't help thinking about the fact that there were four beds in the two rooms, but only three people to sleep in them.

Bert sat behind him, leaning his chin on Reiner's shoulder, and puffing air into his ear.

"Should we open the shop?" Reiner asked, when he'd pushed the other boy away, and nipped at the air in front of his nose in a playful threat.

"Probably," Bert said, sliding his feet back into his shoes, and standing up with a great, craning stretch that made the hem of his shirt ride up his stomach. Reiner pretended to glare at him for it, and received a cheeky smile for the effort.

Reiner was the one who turned the sign around, and flicked the switch to light up the neon against the setting sun. It shown brightly outside the windows, flickering every once in a while. He watched it leaning against the window sill behind the counter as Bert sat behind him, continuing to read the manual.

It wasn't very busy. Annie entertained herself by practicing her kicks out by the dumpster. Reiner found himself bothering Bert, sitting on the counter, and flicking him in the nose, or licking the backs of his ears to make him wiggle, and glare.

A few cars pulled up for gas and drove away after interacting with the machines, but no one came inside.

The sun set slowly over the mountain's backs, and laid it's weary head down for the night. The door dinged. Reiner ignored it, assuming it was Annie, and continued pushing Bert's stool with his foot. He was still sitting on the counter when someone behind him cleared their throat, and he turned around to see two boys standing there with candy bars in their hands.

They looked about thirteen, and smelled off. Not like any other human Reiner had ever gotten whiff of.

"Sorry," he said, stepping out of the way as the blonde slid the chocolates across the counter, and Bert stepped up, also eyeing them nervously. The boy's skin was so pale, Reiner could see the blue of his veins through it like it was paper. He looked sick, and frail, all thin wrists when he produced a wallet with a stylized bat on it.

The other boy was looking at the furs on display by the register while Bert started to ring them up. Reiner watched him sniff at them, and then feel them experimentally, before pulling hand back.

"Hey, Armin, these are real," he said, leaning over to touch the blonde.

Reiner huffed air through his nose, trying to imagine what else they would be.

"That's cool," Armin said dismissively, handing Bert the money he owed them.

"It's rabbit," Reiner said, taking note of the boy's large green eyes when they fixed on him. "We have other kinds too."

"How do you get them?"

Reiner looked a Bert, his scrunched up nose, and the confusion on his face mirroring how Reiner felt about that question. "He hunt them?" he said.

"Isn't that illegal?" the boy asked.

"Why would it be?"

"I thought you needed a license to do that," the blonde said.

"But how do you eat if you don't hunt?" Bert asked.

"We buy our food at the grocery store," the brunette boy told them.

"But how do you get your meat," Reiner tried, making it clearer.

"We buy it at the grocery store," they reiterated.

"Like jerky?" Reiner asked.

"They must eat jerky," Bert agreed. "You know that's not healthy, right?"

The boys looked at one another for a moment, confusion on their faces, and Annie kicked the door open.

"Dinner," she said, holding a couple of rabbits by their feet.

The boys both balked, and shuffled nervously. Watching as Annie dropped the crossbow off her shoulder. Reiner, and Bert stared at them.

"You should stay for dinner. Your parents clearly aren't taking care of you," Reiner told them. Their faces went pale.

"I think I'm good," the little one said. Reiner frowned.

"Are you sure? You look sick."

"What are you, hill people?" the brunette asked, standing quickly between his friend, and Reiner.

Reiner started back a bit as Bert stood up suddenly, sensing the challenge.

"We come from up the mountain, if that's what you mean," Annie said, opening up the pack that had been on her back, and pulling out another rabbit. "I don't see why that's a bad thing though. At least we're not you. You're all dependent, and needy. How will you survive if your perfect little system fails?"

They seemed to look for then answer. She huffed at that.

"The answer is you won't. You won't survive, but we will. We farm what we need, and we hunt what we can't. We grow what we can, and we gather what we can't, and we'll live if something happens to the cattle, or the carrots, but you'll all starve if just one little link in the chain goes out. You don't get it? That's fine. Get out. We don't need you. We'll live."

"Annie," Reiner said in warning. The journal said to be nice to customers.

"Oh, stop being such a bitch, Reiner," she threw at him. She stomped over, past the boys, and handed the rabbits to him. "Skin these. We can make soup out of 'em."

"You're really going to eat those?" the brunette asked.

Reiner looked at the rabbits. "Um, yeah," he said, and then paused. "Bert's a pretty good cook, you're sure you don't want any?"

They both looked for a moment at Annie. "We should really-" the blonde started, but his friend cut him off, staring straight at her.

"Sure," he said.

"Mikasa will worry," the blonde protested.

"Then call her, and say we're getting dinner."

"Come on," Reiner said, starting for the kitchen, "I'll show you how we do it." The brunette followed him with a determined look on his face. "My name's Reiner."

"Eren," he said as Reiner toed the employees only door open, and lead him toward the kitchen.

He dropped the rabbits onto a butcher's block, and reached for a knife, testing it's edge against the back of his fingernail. "Sharp knife. If it's dull it's more likely to catch on the intestines, and ruin the meat," he said, dragging one of the rabbits over. "Start at the sternum, and work downward to the groin. Then start to pull the skin back."

Eren watched with fascination, fingers turning white on the edge of the counter. "That smells like shit," he said.

Reiner gave him a soft chuckle. "It could be worse."

"Who taught you how to do this?"

"My mother."

"My mom cooks too, but I don't think I've ever seen her skin her own animals," he said, making a face as Reiner pulled the rest of the pelt off, and started in on the muscles, cupping his fingers around the organs, and pulling them clean out into a bowl.

"At home, my dad would hunt, or kill the animal, and then he'd bring it in, and my mom would teach me how to prepare it. It ended up being this system, you know. Dad would bring it in, I'd prepare it, and mom would cook it. Now Annie hunts, and Bert cooks."

"Are you guys related?" he asked.

"We're cousins, but everyone's cousins back home."

Eren made another face. "How do you get married?"

Reiner shrugged. "Never saw it as a problem," he said, "But everyone does make it kind of a big deal to bring someone home if you can." He picked up the rabbit's leg, and shored the muscle off the bone, pulling the tendons out, and setting them aside for Annie.

"What brought you guys down the mountain?" the other boy asked. Eren looked over his shoulder to where the blonde had found a seat that the table after following them.

"Comin' of age thing," Reiner told them. "Everyone spends two years off the mountain before they settle down."

"Sounds like what the Amish do. Send their kids out when they come of age to make the choice for themselves whether or not they want to continue being Amish," the boy said. Reiner made a face at the rabbit. That wasn't it in the slightest. They came down t learn how to assimilate in the event that hunters struck, and they had to run.

"You guys have got a funny accent," Eren said as Bert, and Annie came in, and set up on the counter beside Reiner, Annie pulling over tendons, and stretching them out long ways, Bert separating out the different organs, setting the intestines in the sink to be cleaned out, and given to Annie.

"Do we?" Reiner asked.

"A bit."

"What's your friend's name?"

"Oh, that's Armin," Eren said. Reiner glanced back at him, and saw that he looked very perturbed by the whole affair, skin paler even than it had been when dinner had first been suggested.

"Hi, Armin," Reiner said. "I'm Reiner. This is Bert, and that's Annie."

Armin waved at him half heartedly.

"Why don't you help Bert out gettin' the meat ready to be cooked?"

He nodded, still looking a bit pale. He and Bert would probably work well together. Especially as it seemed they were similarly meek. The candy bars they had bought lay on the table, innocently forgotten.

"I'm actually good here," Bert said, "but there should be some potatoes, and carrots in the pantry. You could start those."

"So you're all cousins?" Eren asked. Reiner nodded. "Well then why does Bert look so different?"

"His mom came from outside of town," Reiner said. Bert's mother was a Native American skin walker. People said that's why he was so big. It was certainly why his skin was so dark.

"What's it like living down here?" Bert asked, looking over at Eren, as Armin came back with an arm full of potatoes, and onions, and carrots.

"Normal, I guess," Eren told him. Annie made a derisive sound as she darted around Bert to get the intestines from the sink.

Reiner started on his second rabbit.

"My dad's a doctor, and my mom stays at home, and takes care of the house," Eren started explaining. "I go to school every day except weekends, and holidays."

"What's school like?"

"You mean you guys have never been to school?"

Reiner, and Bert looked at each other, and then at Annie. "No," Reiner said. "Our parents taught us."

"But then how did you learn about history, and science?" Eren asked.

"We learn history from the stories," Bert said. "Everyone tells stories, and we learn from them."

"Science is that stuff where people talk to ghosts, right?" Annie asked.

"Yeah, I think so," Reiner said. Bert laughed.

"You guys really need to read more," he said.

Armin looked aghast. "You don't read?"

Reiner felt a bit guilty about that. He looked down at the rabbit, and scooped out it's insides into the bowl, before starting on separating out the muscles and tendons again.

"Reiner has trouble readin'," Bert said softly. "Annie just hates all that hu-" he cut off just short of saying "human stuff" and looked nervously at Reiner.

"Annie hates books," Reiner said. "She thinks they're too unrealistic."

When the last rabbit was skinned, Reiner took the pelts to the table, and showed Eren how to salt them so that they tanned, laying them out on a cookie sheet.

"That's it?" Eren asked. "Just salt?"

"Yeah. You can set them out in the sun too, but that makes them hard. Salt dries them out, and lets them stay soft. It's easier to make things out of them then." Eren looked fascinated by the whole thing as Reiner moved to scraping the excess tissue off the second hide.

"What's the biggest thing you've ever hunted?" he asked.

"A bear," Reiner said. Eren looked astonished.

"How?"

"Took three shots."

"Arrows?"

Reiner shook his head. "Bullets. One from each of us, and then we had to carry it all together."

"Did you eat it?"

"Everyone ate it."

"The whole town," Bert said. "I got lots of compliments on my cooking."

He was cooking the rabbit down into broth as Armin watched.

"So where are you two from?" he asked.

"Pretty close by, actually," Armin said. "We live a couple miles from here."

Bert nodded.

It took a while for the food to be done cooking, but by the time that it was, the smell of fresh herbs had fully replaced the iron of blood. Bert served the food up in bowls from the cupboard with bread before sitting down.

Armin stared at his plate for a moment before eating. "I've never had rabbit before," he told them, and there was a moment of dumbfounded shock, and silence.

"That's it," Reiner said, leaning over his own bowl. "You two are comin' over for dinner again, and we're going to teach you how to take proper care of yourselves, alright?"

They nodded meekly, and he sighed. "Good."

Annie was glaring at him, but he ignored it. She could deal with the humans. They had to live with them for two more years after all. Having friends wouldn't be so bad.

"The soup is really good," Eren said after a few bites. Reiner watched Bert smile quietly to himself.

"Thank you," he half whispered.

Eren and Armin weren't such bad kids. They were young for their age, but that didn't mean they couldn't be taught right. They were going to teach them right.


	3. Chapter 3

The human world was unendingly smelly. It was just as fascinating as it was overwhelming. Reiner found himself spending most of his time with his face buried in Bert's skin, trying to drown it all out. It was also filled with sounds. Sounds that had been an annoyance at first, but were quickly becoming a hindrance for all three of them.

The mountains were filled with sound as well, but they were natural sounds. The sounds of birds in the trees and wind. Here it was constant, and unending. The sounds of cars, and people yelling.

Bert was being driven up the walls, his nerves getting the better of him as he retreated again and again into the bedroom to try and get away from it. Reiner found himself in a constant state of worry as Annie began to exhibit similar traits of nervous behavior.

The truth was he was on the precipice of a break down, and only just managing to keep it all together. Sex was his boon. It kept him sane. It seemed to be aiding in the degradation of Annie's sanity, though. She wasn't exactly fond of listening, it seemed.

They found themselves sitting in their underclothes in the bedroom more often than not, watching the ceiling fan rotate slowly over the floor as the heat crept in, and stayed in. They did not leave the shop except to hunt.

That day, Annie was running the register, and everything was dead. There wasn't even a single car on the road that needed refueling. Reiner stared at the ceiling, the way the light fell across the room, ears as closed as he could keep them to the continuing sounds outside.

Beside him, Bert had somehow managed to find sleep, curling on his side facing Reiner, mouth slightly open to take shallow breaths.

Reiner heard the cars on the street, and the sound of Bert living, his heart beating, and his stomach gurgling around food he had eaten. He heard Annie sweeping the floors of the shop out of boredom, and the sound of footsteps outside on the gravel.

Small footsteps. He sat up, and took a moment to taste the air curiously, finding Eren's peculiar sent. It had been about two weeks since they had met the boy, and probably about three days since they last sighted him. Annie had compared him to a timid, and elusive animal, but Reiner had pointed out that he was not near so timid or elusive as his friend, who they only really saw past dusk.

Armin's avoidance was understandable though, due to the clear sensitivity of his skin. Annie had not been amused by Reiner that day. She rarely was, really.

He stood up, and left Bert to sleep soundly in his absence as he walked into the store proper.

Eren was once again standing, and inspecting the various furs they had on display. His expression was pensive as he ran a finger along a cut of buckskin.

"You just really like our furs, don't you?" Reiner asked, as Annie watched them warily from the other side of the store.

"I'd never buy them," Eren said defensively. His expression was war torn though. Some continuing internal struggle about humane practices, and legalities. "But I guess they're nice," he conceded, looking back to them. "I like how they smell."

"Who doesn't? It's fuckin' homey."

Eren's eyes widened. "Dude, you can't say that."

"Say what?"

"Fuck," the boy whispered.

Reiner cast an questioning glance at Annie, and found that her eyebrows had risen quite a bit as she watched the interaction. "Why not?"

"It's a bad word," Eren explained. Reiner cocked his head.

Fuck was not a bad word. Not so far as he knew. Everyone said fuck. Fuck, everyone fucked. He couldn't understand what was wrong with it. It didn't imply weakness, or anything negative. Unlike bitch, it did not denote a worthlessness aside from the ability to breed. Nor did it imply a lack of intelligence the way the word idiot did. It wasn't offensive in the slightest, by renouncing another person's wolfdom, by saying they were more like a human, nor by implying lameness.

"No it isn't," Reiner said. Eren looked flabbergasted.

Reiner laughed softly, and threw an arm around the boy's slight shoulders, pulling him close to his side.

"Come on, tell me who doesn't fuck."

Eren seemed at a loss of ability to.

"Alright, then tell me what doesn't fuck."

"Germs?" Eren said, more of a question than a statement.

"Are we germs, Eren?"

"No," Eren said softly.

"Then why is it bad for us to fuck? It's natural for us to fuck. Our parents fucked to make us, we'll fuck to make our kids. Cows fuck, deers fuck, bears fuck. Wolves, and coyotes, and boars fuck. Trees, and flowers fuck by spreading pollen. Fuckin's a good thing. It keeps the world filled with life."

Eren blinked at the floor, and then looked at Reiner. "I never looked at it that way," he said.

"Well now you do," Reiner told him. "So what's up?"

"Nothing really. I'm just bored I guess."

"Bored?"

"Yeah."

Reiner looked at Annie, who was now leaning over the counter cleaning her nails out with a sewing needle. "You want me to teach you how to shoot a rifle?" he asked. Eren's eyes widened once more.

"Isn't that illegal?" he asked.

Apparently everything Reiner, Annie, and Bert did was illegal. "Nah," Reiner told him, though he wasn't exactly sure himself. Back home it certainly wasn't, but sometimes laws changed from town to town so far as he could tell. "I'll take you out into the woods, and I'll show you, alright?"

Eren nodded quietly.

Reiner took him up into the forest a ways, watching as the sun settled slowly into the west, casting longer shadows beneath the trees. They set up a series of busted old soda cans, and bottles on a fallen log, and stood away from it.

Reiner showed him how the rifle worked, where the safety was, and how to properly hold it proper against his shoulder, explaining how to look down the barrel, and into the sights, so that they lined up with the target.

Eren was a lousy shot, anyway. The kick was too hard against his collar bone, and it threw him off balance every time. Reiner thought it was hilarious. Eren didn't exactly agree. He was getting better though, and rather quickly for someone who'd never been allowed to hold a gun in his life. Reiner was beginning to think Eren's doctor-father and do-nothing-mother were trying to set him up for death when it came time for him to provide for himself.

"Breathe in," Reiner instructed as Eren aimed again. "Hold it. Exhale, and shoot." The shot glanced off the log beneath the target, and Reiner whooped for him, though Eren still didn't seem to be impressed with himself.

"Don't rifles blow holes in things?" he asked.

"That's buckshot," Reiner explained, taking the rifle, and popping it open to reload it. "This is bird shot. I didn't want you bitchin' up too bad. You can kill someone with buckshot like it's nothin'."

Eren nodded, and stared at where he'd scored the log. He held his hands out expectant for the rifle to fill them, and Reiner gave it back, watching as he aimed again.

"Now this time when you inhale, try, and pay attention to your heartbeats. Try to fire between them. It'll make your hand steadier."

Eren nodded, and took a deep breath. Reiner watched him count heartbeats, and mull them over in his mind. Eren seemed like the kind of boy who never really had wondered hard about his heart, or his body ticking away without his notice. He had probably just let it be that. Subconscious, something that happened regardless of his will.

He squeezed the trigger, and missed, the shot skimming right by the neck of the bottle that was his mark.

"Fuck!" he yelled, dropping the rifle from his shoulder. "I am never gonna get this."

"You've been shootin' for an hour and a half," Reiner said.

"How long have you been shooting?" Reiner looked up into the branches above them, scratching a spot just above his ear.

"Since I was five," he said, recounting the memory of his father laying his first gun in his hands.

Eren looked scandalized. "Why?" he asked.

"My father had to get me ready," Reiner said, taking the rifle from Eren, and bringing it to his shoulder. "Talent is just practice. People don't see the practice, so they call it talent," he said, pausing to through one of the cans. Eren watched with wide eyes, as he took out the second, and third targets in quick succession. "People put magical emphasis on ability that way, and make other people think it's unobtainable when the truth is that true talent is rare. I'm not talented, and so my parents taught me from the first moment they could to try and make sure that I would be able to take care of myself."

"I guess that makes sense," Eren said. "But what's so bad that you had to train that hard?"

"We live in a hard world," Reiner told him, crossing to the log to place some more cans out. "We have to hunt our food, and defend our homes from threats."

"Like bears?"

"Humans mostly. Humans have always been the big problem."

"Really?"

"You ever studied the history of war?" Reiner asked. He watched Eren think on that. "See the way humans work is you've got a group of them, and usually they get along so long as the group is pretty small, right?"

"Yeah," Eren said tentatively.

"But then they find out there's another group of humans, and they realize they feel threatened, or they want something, or maybe both. Maybe they just want to prove themselves to someone, or something. Regardless, they see the other group of humans, and they attack that group. It can be for a reason as silly as being just a little bit different. Well, where I come from's a lot different from this, and so your group hates my group, and because your group's bigger, my group has to be stronger."

"I guess that makes sense," Eren said again.

Reiner had him aim at the targets until the rifle was emptied again, and then packed up so they could start the walk home. It was dark once they got back, the moon was rising, waxing full, and sewing beauty beneath her. Reiner lifted his face to greet hers, and closed his eyes to let her light lay itself over them.

Beside him, Eren took a moment to cock his head in confusion, not understanding. Reiner didn't feel the need to explain. He likely wouldn't have been able to anyway. He took Eren inside instead, and brought him to the kitchen for dinner. It was easier this time. Eren didn't ask so many strange questions, and they didn't have so many stilted answers.

Most of the conversation trended toward Annie's ridiculous ability to throw both Bert, and Reiner over her head like they were five pound sacks of flour. Eren went home with left overs, and a rabbit skin hat they had made for him, grinning like an idiot.

They didn't see him again until the day after the full moon, when the stacks of newspaper were delivered in the morning to be put into the dispensers on the sidewalk, and there his forlorn face spoke volumes beneath the heading, "Yeager Children Orphaned By Vicious Animal Attack".

Bert was the one who figured out how to work the phone to call the Yeager residence as listed in the phone book. No one answered. Instead, they mourned for the boy's family in silence, delving deep into the woods, and howling for the dead.

It stung deep in Reiner's chest, though he'd never met Eren's parents. No unprepared child should be left so alone. Of course, he realized it wasn't exactly his place to be a parent to someone only two years younger than he was, but there was still a feeling in his chest that Eren had somehow become family, and that meant he was there for the kid to lean on. Not that Eren knew it. Not that Eren called on it.

They lived a long couple of weeks in silence, doing only what they had to. Waiting for someone to find out that the attack hadn't been animals at all.


	4. Chapter 4

Jean's hands ached from where they'd been gripping the steering wheel for so long. There were miles of road behind them now. Miles, and acres, and ages. The ground was beginning to wind up around mountains again though, and the plains were giving way to rolling hills.

Marco rustled about with the newspaper in the passenger's seat, feet kicked up on the dashboard, shoulders nested in the curve of the seatback.

"You're sure?" Jean asked not for the first time, though it was rather fruitless to continue questioning it now that they were so close.

"Positive," Marco said, still reading the article. He'd been reading the article for a week now, and Jean was starting to get plain sick, and tired of it. "You just don't like the idea of being in the south again."

Jean scoffed at him, and sneered at the road. There was an intense quiet in the car's cabin. The kind of quiet that only came from sleeping on the seats for more than a night in a row to save on money, and having to look at one another every day without respite.

They were both itching for a fight. Any minute they'd been tearing into one another over something as silly as a mixed tape. So Jean avoided music, but the lack of sound only seemed to make it worse.

"We could listen to Styx," Marco said, rolling his window up, and down, and finally deciding he liked the way the way felt on his face. His right foot found itself carefully hung out into the wind, boot moving around his curling, and uncurling toes.

"We've listened to Renegade eight times on this trip already. No more Styx," Jean said. Marco made a low whining sound in his throat, glaring at the greenery that rushed by them.

"I could give you road head," he said suddenly. Jean felt like he'd been punched in the diaphragm, head whipping around to get a better look at the other boy.

Looking at Marco didn't enlighten him to whether or not he was joking, so Jean settled on a nervous laugh, turning back to the windshield. "You're kidding me right? We're both dudes, and that pretty intensely dangerous, right?"

"You'd have a point if we weren't currently out to hunt some werewolves down, and kill them," Marco said dead pan, still staring out the window.

Jean swallowed hard. "Still both dudes," he pointed out again.

Marco shrugged, and they lapsed back into silence for a few moments.

"You're horny too, though, right?" he asked after a while. "Like, this isn't just me?"

Jean gave the steering wheel a wide eyed, nervous look. He was, but that was really beside the point. It wasn't like they hadn't had time alone when they'd stopped in motels, to watch porn, and get off.

"Yeah, but what does that matter?" he asked nervously.

"Nothing, I guess," Marco said, shoving his leg out the window farther so that his knee hooked around the door. "Hey, is that a Denny's?"

Jean laughed at the sudden topic change. It was unsure why, but Marco was in love with Denny's in a way that would have made Poe's Annabel Lee jealous.

They stopped in for breakfast, and drove the rest of the day before they found themselves in the town of the Yeager animal attack, fueling up the tank at a podunk gas station that gave Jean the creeps. Marco was complaining about how they'd lived off of Pringles, and Munchies for too long, and he was so sick of them he'd never be able to look at sour cream and onion again, while Jean was actually being productive by pumping the gas.

"You should ask if there's anywhere nice to eat," Marco told him. Jean groaned, and marched off to the creepiest food mart he'd ever seen. Marco was at least kind enough to come with, trailing behind at the door to stare at the bone chimes.

A bell clanged when Jean pushed through to inside, and he found himself looking at a huge, blonde boy about his age, bent over the cash register. The kids eyes found his, almost seeming to glow in the low fluorescent lighting. They were an odd yellow color. One Jean hadn't ever seen before.

Jean cleared his throat under the scrutiny of the boy, and shuffled off in the direction of chips, when Marco's hand caught him by the shoulder.

"We were just wondering," Marco said in a cheery tone of voice, "If there's anywhere to eat around here."

He boy cocked his head as if to let the words trickle from his ear into his brain, and braced an elbow on top of the register. "Not really sure," he said in an accent Jean wasn't actually able to place. "We don't go out much. Ay, Bertl!" he called and a thin, dark skinned boy that was even taller popped his head in past the employes only door in the back. "You know about anywhere these guys can stop, and eat?"

Bertl scrunched up his face. "No Bertl," he said first, in the same accent, making the first boy smile wolfishly at him. "And no, I'm not really sure. I could try the phone book."

"Maybe Annie knows?"

"Annie is the least likely to know," Bertl told him.

"Where you guys comin' from?" the blonde asked.

"Last place we stopped at for any real length of time was Atlanta," Marco said.

"Atlanta?" the boy asked, as if he'd never heard of the place before, and was desperately trying to find something related in his mind. "That's that place where people go to loose their money, right?"

"Yeah," Marco said softly.

Jean felt really apprehensive about the whole shop, and the two boys working it, but Marco's hand was slowly tightening on his shoulder, keeping him in place.

"You guys just passin' through, or are you in town for any real reason?"

"Well, some of our relatives just passed away, and we're here for the funeral," Marco said, always quick to the excuses.

The boy's face became instantly forlorn. "We just had a friend loose his mother," he said. "Her funerals about to be comin' up. He's pretty torn up about it."

"Eren?" Marco asked, knowing the boy's name from the article.

The boy perked up. "You're Eren's family?" he asked suddenly.

"Yeah, I'm Carla's cousin, and this is my boyfriend," Marco lied. The boy cocked his head again, and Jean expected him to come out with some old southern rhetoric about Adam, and Eve before his face broke out into a huge grin.

"Stay for dinner," he told them, much to Jean's surprise. "Bert's cookin' right now, and it'll be done in about ten minutes by the smell of it."

Jean couldn't smell anything. He eyed the furs by the check out counter, and then the boy's wide, welcoming smile.

"We really shouldn't," he said quickly, shrugging Marco's hand off. "We just wanna get some take out, so we can get to a motel and get a room, and get to bed as soon as possible."

The boy seemed disappointed, but didn't push it any further. "Just a second," he said instead, and rounded the counter quickly, moving for the back door. "You find anythin'?" he called in, and they heard Bert say something before coming out with a huge phone book open in both hands.

"There's a Five Guys?" he paused seemingly to re-read that, and nodded. "Just down the street a little ways. Shouldn't be too hard to find," he told them. "Is there anything else you need?"

Jean looked at Marco, who's smile was still firmly in place. "No, we should be good for now," he said, turning toward the door.

"You're sure?" the blonde asked, as Jean's eyes caught sight of Marco's hand, hanging down by his thigh, curled inward, to point behind him to where there was a bushel of yellow flowers drying by the window.

"Yeah," Marco said.

"Well if you do, my name's Reiner. Any friend of Eren's is a friend of ours."

"We'll be sure to keep that in mind," Jean said, staring at the flowers.

"See you around," Marco said, before leading them to the door. "Don't say anything," he snapped when Jean opened his mouth after the door had closed.

Instead they walked silently back to the car, and got in. Five Guys was not hard to find, but Jean couldn't stop thinking about the flowers.

"Was that what I think it was?" he asked, when they were sitting in a freshly rented motel room, with their burgers.

"Yep," Marco replied, staring at his food.

"I've never seen it in any color other than blue before," Jean said.

"No. Wolfsbane comes in white, pink, blue, and yellow," Marco told him. "And to be honest, I really can't think of a good reason someone would be hanging up up to dry by their window if they weren't trying to keep werewolves away."

"So they know something."

"They know Eren, right? Maybe he's told them."

"They seem more hickish than anyone else we've seen so far," Jean observed.

Marco hummed around a bite of burger thoughtfully. Jean really didn't know where to go from there.

He went to bed thinking about the wolfsbane, and Reiner's half glowing eyes.

There were secrets in the gas station.


	5. Chapter 5

The flowers in the window turned from yellow to brown in a matter of days, drying, and staying petrified in place. Reiner took them down, and dropped them in a dry vase right side up for Eren, tying a new bushel in their place. They kept a constant vigil for the dead, their yellow petals a light in the dark.

He sat by the window each night, and wondered if this tradition even had the possibility of helping. Bert didn't say anything about it.

During those days, the two boys who had claimed to be Eren's relatives were crawling around the gas station almost every morning when the sun was just cresting the ridge above the town.

They learned their scents, and took special note of it every time. Annie thought they were lying about who they were. Reiner didn't want to think that. He kept special tabs on them to try, and prove she was wrong.

He caught them out by the dumpsters, and checking the gas price listings on the sign outside, and poking through the furs on display. Each time they seemed just as happy, and accommodating as the first time they'd met, though the thin one was always a bit on edge.

He asked them about Eren, and each time they gave non committal answers. Slowly, he felt his hackles raise, but still found that it wasn't his place to take action. It wasn't until Eren finally arrived that he realized just how wrong things had gone.

That subtle scent of not-quite-normal Eren had possessed before, something almost similar to, and yet diametrically opposed to Armin's off-ness, had taken full shape. Reiner didn't notice at first that it was Eren coming through the door. Instead, he thought that it was another wolf. One he didn't know.

He heard Bert dive into the bed in the back room, and Annie's breathing slow to shallow ebbs as she prepared for a territory squabble, and yet it was Eren entered the shop, eyes wide, and face strangely open.

"Eren?"

"Hi, Reiner," Eren said.

"Are you alright?"

Eren nodded softly, holding a hand by his ear, and gesturing vaguely. "Everything's just so loud," he said. "And Mikasa won't let me go anywhere."

It wasn't the first time Reiner had heard Eren talk about Mikasa like that. Though he'd never met the girl, he liked to imagine he knew quite a bit about her. Reiner nodded, and rounded the counter.

"Hey, would you mind if I-" he stopped, wondering if her should reach out, and touch the boy. There was something strange about his stance. The way his feet met the floor spoke of a desire to keep light on the ground, able to dance out of bounds in a second.

Eren shrugged, and Reiner reached out, pulling the collar of his shirt back.

There it was, huge, and open, and gnarled right over his clavicle. Reiner took a sharp breath. He'd heard about it, but he'd never actually seen the bite. Not since the rogue turn had eaten Berik when they'd been eleven. Even then, that bite had been covered by fur, and it had been fresh, still coursing with pulsing blood. Eren's bite was empty of any of that. It was just pink punctures, and infection reaching deep into the muscles around the bone.

"Bert!" Reiner cried, picking the boy up, and holding him close to his chest as he rushed into the back room. He couldn't fathom how many people Eren would have had the chance to get to without proper care. Had he killed anyone, Reiner wondered. Fresh turns were wild, and uncontrollable. That's why giving the bite without proper authorization was against their laws. One could loose an entire village playing with newly wolfed humans as if they were tamed dogs.

Bert came to the bedroom door with wide eyes, and took Eren in, still in a panic. "Get me the sewing kit," Reiner said, pushing into the kitchen.

Eren's hands were clutching at his shirt, and his eyes were wide as he tried to catch up to what was happening. Reiner laid him down on the table, and held him still while he ripped his shirt off.

"It'll green if we don't do something about it now," he told the boy, seeing the panic in his eyes. "This is probably going to hurt," he said, when Bert set the kit down.

Reiner pulled a knife out, and handed it to Annie as she came through the door to see what all the fuss was. "Heat this on the stove until it glows," he said. "Bert, hold him down."

Bert did as he was told, and not for the first time, Reiner thought about the wonder of Eren's survival through the kind of neglect that seemed to be so common in humans. He would have been more than angry with the boy's doctor-father if he hadn't known the man was likely dead.

"What are you doing?" Eren asked wildly.

"I'm taking care of you. The bite's bad, and it hasn't been treated. We need to open it up, and express the infection that's taking hold before it gets in your blood."

"Then what?" Eren asked wildly, looking to where Annie was standing at the stove.

"Then we need to cauterize it," Reiner told him.

Eren's eyes went wide, and he swung his arm around, trying to break out of Bertholdt's hold on him.

"I'm sorry, Eren," Reiner said, "But you need to hold still, alright?" Eren just shook his head, and whimpered. Reiner didn't begrudge him for it. He had seen more powerful wolves brought to tears by the prospect of surgery. Fear was to be expected.

Reiner tipped a bit of the aconite tea they kept with the medical equipment into the boy's mouth to act as a sedative, and a pain killer.

Bert shoved a cloth between his teeth to keep him from biting his tongue.

The first cut didn't bring any blood to the surface, which meant that the wound was worse than it looked. Reiner wondered how much of the flesh had died in the time it had gone ignored. He cut deeper to pull it out, free hand holding Eren still when he finally started feeling it through the layers of atrophied tissue.

"It'll be alright," Bert said softly, petting Eren's head with his free hand. "Reiner's got steady hands, and we've been trained to take care of our own."

Eren whimpered, and cried harder, but the poison was slowly taking effect, slowing his heart rate to cover blood loss, and dulling the pain of the knife. Bert kept talking to him through it, asking simple questions, prompting him to answer with nods of the head in order to check his lucidity.

Reiner pulled deep swaths of infected skin away from the wound, wiping the newly flowing blood up with a cloth so that he could see where next to direct the blade. The sweat on Eren's skin made his chest slick, and his body harder to hold, but Bert's hands were still strong on his biceps.

Reiner stepped back to let it bleed when the infected flesh was fully cleaned out. Hopefully the blood would do what if did naturally, and push any remaining toxins out. That's when he called for the knife, and Annie brought it to them, it's blade glowing red hot.

"Hold him," he said, and watched Annie round to Eren's feet, grabbing him by the ankles. Bert pushed his head to the side to properly bare the wound, and Reiner pressed the knife down over it, the width of the metal covering the area, and burning the skin until the blood stopped.

Eren screamed, and thrashed, but weakened by the pain, and the poison, was effectively held still until Reiner pulled the knife away, and pressed a balm over the wound. Bert pushed half ground herbs over it to form a compress, and together they moved him to the extra bed in Annie's room, laying him on the mattress, and listening to the creaking of the strings.

"What's Armin's phone number?" Bert asked softly, and Eren, in his last moments of coherency was able to tell him.

Bert made the phone call, while Reiner fretted, and Annie sat by Eren on the cot. There was a sense of passed urgency. A feeling of the need to be doing something, but having nothing productive to do.

Eren had been lucky. The bite should have killed him. Where it was, and how badly it had been infected should have robbed him of his ability to walk, and think. He should have been dead before he got there.

Armin was there in under an hour with a girl who looked different than anyone they had ever seen. She was clearly Mikasa, and all she did was glare, and immediately challenge Annie to a fight that wasn't actually fought once they showed her to Eren.

They showed her the flesh they'd taken off of him, and asked her how on earth she'd thought he was properly taken care of.

She simply bit her tongue, and glared at the floor. "We don't need anyone's help."

"The lone wolf needs the pack," Annie told her softly. "You neglect your family, and your family starves."

Mikasa didn't want to hear it. "I take care of Eren," she said.

Reiner put a hand on her shoulder carefully, drawing her attention. "How can you take care of him if no one's taught you how?" he asked.

There was pain in her. The kind of pain that people didn't often see, but Reiner understood it. He too had a need to take care of his own, but he had at least been gifted the skills to by his parents.

She hadn't. These human children, some no longer that, had been left in a world that was harsh, and cruel, and unpredictable without the knowledge of how to survive it, or take care of one another.

She made a face at the ground, but otherwise held her silence. She held her silence, and so did the room. Breathing in time with Eren, they sat there, looking at the floor, and contemplating their lives.

Eren would wake up at some point. Reiner knew he would, but there was still the possibility that he wouldn't, and it set a shaking numbness into his hands. It made him panic.

A hand laid itself firmly on his shoulder, and when he looked back, it was to catch Bertholdt looking at him. A friendly gesture to a pack mate in need, though what he needed was likely a little less friendly.

He didn't fight it, instead turning into the other boy's presence, and leaning his head up against his shoulder. He could feel Armin and Mikasa looking as Annie got up, and crossed to them, laying a hand on either of their backs. It had been a hard day. One if their own was ill. Even Annie needed comfort sometimes.

That was when it seemed to catch on what was happening. Fighting was bad for the sick. They had always been told that.

Reiner reached out, and cupped his hand gently around Eren's ankle. He heard Mikasa's hand follow suit, and find Eren as well, and then they were all sitting in the room, touching him, and touching one another, knowing it was what was best for human, and wolf alike.


	6. Chapter 6

The gas station wasn't their only lead. Eren, and Mikasa never showed for the funeral, but they were certainly still in town. After asking around, Marco found them at the Arlert house. Old friends of the family, they were told. Armin, the Arlert scion- if he could be called that by the small bit of nothing he was set to inherit, was Eren, and Mikasa's best friend. He was a small, wispy boy, with blonde hair and blue eyes, who didn't like going outside too much during the day.

In fact, the kid was practically nocturnal, which put Marco on edge, though Jean seemed to be completely fine with him. So he could be wary of a group of werewolf conscientious hillbillies working in a food mart, but how dare Marco worry about a boy exhibiting signs of vampirism.

Of course Jean would be unsuspicious of Armin when he was crushing on his friend. Marco was not bitter. He was not jealous, and he was not wishing that he was a hot half oriental girl. Not in the slightest.

He was too busy focusing on the case, and the fact that they couldn't seem to actually get a hold of Eren. Marco was fearing the worst at this point. Jean didn't want to talk about the possibility of a thirteen-year-old kid taking the bite. Apparently it was too close to home. Too close to the imaginary wedding bells ringing in his deranged little head.

Everyone knew that werewolves were beasts that couldn't control themselves or their transformations, though. They were monsters. They killed people, and woke up thinking it was just a bad case of somnambulism without a clue in the world that they had done it. It was a shame, but they were something that had to be dealt with. Even if they were the kid brothers of hot chicks.

"We need to get an actual car," Jean said as Marco poured over his notes again.

Marco scoffed at him, and turned the page. Jean had yet to find out why, but Marco was stone walling him from any conversation that was unrelated to the case.

"What?" he asked, tone harsh, body curling angrily toward Marco in the passenger's seat.

"Nothing," Marco told him.

"No, it's not nothing. You've been doing this since we went to the Arlert house yesterday. It's not nothing," Jean insisted.

Yesterday had been when they met Mikasa, and Jean had gone instantly does eyed.

Marco shrugged a single shoulder, and continued to be passive aggressive. Honestly, it was mostly because he was unsure how he was supposed to handle the situation. He knew he was being entirely irrational, being as Jean had never shown any actual interest in having a relationship with him. Not even in the slightest. And yet, there he was, seething over the fact that he found some girl hot. He had literally no excuse, and yet he had no vent except work.

"My father just wants this whole thing over as soon as possible," Marco said, explaining it all away, and ignoring Jean's side eyeing.

Jean sighed, and shook his head, turning back to the windshield without another word.

"I was thinking we could stop by the gas station again," Marco said. "Maybe he's there." He was Eren. There didn't need to be any more deliberation on that.

Jean grumbled as he started the engine, and pulled out of the motel parking lot to head for the gas station.

Marco wondered, not for the first time, if the reason Jean felt so weird being down south was because it was too reminiscent of where he'd grown up in New Orleans. Maybe it reminded him too harshly of the kind of life he'd left behind when he'd run up north in search of a job, and fell into Marco's father's lap with the basic knowledge of how to work a shotgun. He'd still had an accent then. It had been adorable. Jean had hated, it of course.

Maybe that's why Jean hated the gas station so very much. Either way, he was not partial to being there, or to being around the three people who worked there, whom he had declared hicks upon their first meeting, and not backed down from since.

Marco found them charming in an odd way. They seemed more connected than most people did, and more accepting than he had expected. Reiner had out and out smiled when he'd insinuated that he, and Jean were dating. Most hicks would have been gunning for him at that point so far as he knew. Or maybe he didn't know much about hicks.

Annie was manning the front when they came through the door. She was the shortest, gruffest, and second most talkative of the three. She also seemed to have a problem with Jean's existence, but that could have been just how she dealt with everyone. Marco wasn't sure.

"Chips are in the back, don't talk to me," she said immediately upon looking up from the crappy romance novel she was reading.

"We're just hear to ask about Eren," Marco said. She gave him a look, but was otherwise completely silent. "Can I talk to Reiner?" he asked then, and she shrugged, and buried her nose in the book again.

Jean growled low in his throat, and she actually bared her teeth at him to put him back in his place. Hunt the animal, be the animal, Marco supposed. It wasn't exactly his method of hunting, but either way.

"Can we duck into the back, and look for him?" Marco asked.

Annie closed the book on her thumb, and gave him the same look before pointing to the sign on the door in question. "Employees only. Can't you read?"

"That's why I was asking," Marco attempted to reason.

"You ain't been invited," Annie told him, tongue clacking hard around her oddly accented consonants. "Reiner'd tell you to piss off anyway. Everybody knows faggots grow on trees."

"What's that mean?" Jean asked.

"Means I don't even need you to start a fire. I can just go out, and get a faggot off a tree. Maybe even make a fartl."

"I don't even know what you're trying to say," he said, trying to push past Marco.

Annie stood up off the stool behind the register, and put her hands on the counter, romance novel making a sushing sound as it was pushed into the wood. "I'm sayin' you ain't even bitch enough to pup for your dog."

Marco blinked.

"Do you even know what faggot means?" Reiner asked from the employees only door way.

"Gay?" Jean asked.

"Nah. Gay means happy. Gay's a good thing. A faggot is a bundle of kindlin' wood. Back in the day when they were burnin' the witches they threw the faggots at their feet into the fire because they weren't even good enough to be staked in the middle. They were just kindlin' for the witch," Reiner explained with a shrug. "It's not a nice thing to say," he added with a pointed look at Annie.

She puffed air at him, and sat back down.

"What can I do you for?" he asked then.

"We were just wondering if you'd seen Eren lately," Marco said.

Reiner shook his head. "Nope, unfortunately not."

"Really?"

"Really," Reiner assured them. "He ain't been 'round since before the attack. Sorry. I don't know much more."

"It's alright," Marco said, getting, not for the first time, a feeling that Reiner was keeping information from him.

"Stop by any time though, and I'll be sure to tell you if I get an update. Or maybe I could call you," he added, and then trailed off. "If I had that thing that let you do that."

"Our phone number."

"Sounds about right," Reiner said.

At least Marco was sure that Reiner wasn't hitting on him when he wrote his number down on a piece of paper, and gave it to the other boy.

"S'all just witch craft," he said as he tucked it into his pocket. "Ain't a bad thing, but it don't make a lick of sense neither."

Marco gave him a soft chuckle, and a goodbye, ushering Jean out the door.

"We'll come back when they're not here, and have a look around," he said when the door was closed behind them.

Bert came out of nowhere, looming tall into their path. "Look around?" he asked, seeming intimidating until Marco caught the slight beading of sweat on his brow, and the nervous cast to his eyebrows. "You mean trespass?"

Marco felt his blood run suddenly cold, thinking suddenly on how on earth he was supposed to get out of this one. "For recycling," he said. Bert's eyes narrowed.

"I don't know what that is, but I do know Annie doesn't like you. And let's just say Reiner's too trustin' to be a good judge of character."

The door behind them jingled, and Marco heard something that sounded oddly mechanical.

"What's goin' on out here Bert?" Annie asked.

"I caught these two talkin' 'bout trespassin' in our home," Bert said.

Five sentences, Marco thought hysterically, That was officially the most they'd ever heard Bert talk. He looked behind him, and saw Annie sliding a bullet into a rifle.

"Oh, don't worry boys, they're bitch bullets," she said. "I am huntin' bitch after all."

Bert sweated a bit more at her phrasing.

Reiner showed at the last minute once again, and laid a hand on Annie's shoulder as he confiscated the gun.

"I think I'd like you to explain to me what exactly is going on here," he said to no one in particular, eyes starting on Annie, and moving full circle to Bert.

"We were just wondering if we could take your recycling off your hands," Marco tried to explain, but Reiner's eyes stayed hard. It was something they'd never seen from him before. He tended to be open, and honest, and trust worthy. Now it seemed like that was entirely gone.

"I'm gonna be really nice when I learn somethin' to you," Reiner said slowly, mouth lingering hard on his consonants to hammer the point home. "We come from a place where we don't talk to outsiders, and we ain't nice to them because ain't once in the whole time our people have been in these mountains have outsiders been nice to us, so I gave you a good chance when I opened our door to you, and honestly that was a chance that could have put my family in danger. So if I turn around, and find you behaving like vipers in the underbrush I will squash your little idiot heads so fast you don't have the chance to strike."

Marco saw Jean shift on his feet beside him, but Bert's hand was on his shoulder before he could run.

Reiner looked at Bert, and took a deep breath before making his request again. "Explain."

"They were talkin' 'bout waitin' till we weren't around and lookin' in on our things," Bert said.

Reiner's cold eyes turned back on them. "I don't know who you are, or why you're here," he said, slamming the shotgun's barrel back into place, and holding it down by his side.

Marco was suddenly more than aware of the throwing knifes beneath his shirt, brain mapping out who he would hit first, and how much reaction time they would have. Reiner would be the first target, and then Jean would take the hint, and take out Bert, leaving it just the two of them against Annie.

"So I'm gonna give you one more chance. You leave right now, and you get to keep your breedin' bits. You don't come back. You don't ask us anymore questions, and you don't endanger my family. You hear?"

Marco felt a bit of the tension ease out of his shoulders when he nodded, and said, "I hear."

Reiner returned the nod, and made a motion to Bert, and Annie. They left them standing outside in unison, only Bert looking back over his shoulder to watch them. They didn't say anything. Marco looking at Jean, and finding his face slightly panicked.

They walked to the car in silence, and drove back to the motel without saying a word.

"They have Eren, don't they?" Jean asked as Marco slid the key card through the door handle.

"That's what I'm thinking," Marco said softly.

"They have Eren, and for some reason they don't want us finding out."

"I've got a theory about that too," Marco told him as he shouldered the door open. Things may have gotten a lot more interesting.


	7. Chapter 7

The first thing Eren knew was that he was lying on his back. His head felt clear in a way it hadn't in a long time, and his body was lighter than it had been when he fell asleep. Then there was the fire in his shoulder when he turned his head, something that shot up his neck and down his arm, and made him cry out abruptly.

Mikasa was there suddenly, leaning out of the nothingness that seemed to surround him, and wrapping her fingers around his wrist.

Someone was singing in another room, voice deep, and soft, words in another language. There was a door at the foot of the bed he was in, and the ceiling was high above him. Everything was blue. A light blue. A pretty blue. Eren didn't know where he was, though. It smelled strange, and strong, and nothing like his home, or Armin's.

"Where?" he asked around the dryness of his throat.

"The gas station," Mikasa said. "You were sick."

He remembered. Reiner had had a knife at his neck, and Bert had been holding him down. It was fuzzy though, and he'd gotten the feeling they were worried through the fear.

There were two voices singing now, the second lighter by an increment than the first.

"I need to go to the bathroom," he said, trying to push himself up, and failing. Mikasa caught his head, and eased him back down onto the pillow.

"Wait a bit, and I'll get Reiner to take you," she said, standing.

Eren groaned. The singing swelled when the door opened, and then seemed to die back down as it slid shut. It stopped all together not long after, and Reiner was swiftly there, lifting him out of the bed.

"We thought the fever would take you," he said as he headed for the hallway. "But you sweated it out in the end. You're a tough kid, you know? It was like you just refused to give up."

"Was it that bad?" Eren asked as Reiner set him on his feet in the bathroom.

"You been asleep for four days," Reiner said. "We took turns watchin' over you at night, and Mikasa ain't left the back area once this whole time. She was worried."

Eren looked at the floor, and took a wobbly step towards the toilet.

"You should probably sit down," Reiner said, kicking up the seat cover, but leaving the seat down around the toilet bowl.

Eren nodded. His legs were shaky, and it worried him a bit, so he listened, and sat to pee rather than standing. Reiner held him steady which made it awkward, and it took a long time to get over the shyness of peeing in front of him, but he was kind of glad that he wasn't alone.

He couldn't imagine having been sick enough to sleep for four days. Had he pissed the bed? Had they had to change his sheets like he was a baby, and they were his diapers?

It worried him. The burn on his neck still ached, but honestly, he felt better. Despite the weakness of his limbs, he felt better.

Reiner walked him back to the bed, and he caught sight of Bert sitting in a room with Armin, singing him a song. He didn't ask what it was about, or why he was singing to Armin. All he really thought about was lying back down, and maybe getting something to eat.

Mikasa brought him bread, and broth, and fed him even though he was sure he could have fed himself. She didn't want him using his arms. She said he might hurt himself worse, so he let her. The food tasted better than anything he'd ever had in his life, and the singing was soothing. Especially when Armin's voice joined in tentatively, wrapping around the foreign words with care not to mangle them too much.

He felt odd, and detached. Almost like he was floating through life. Mikasa kept touching his arm, careful not to lay her hands too high, and press on the sensitive skin. There was something homey about it all. Something that felt strangely safe. A feeling he belonged.

It stood in stark contrast with the trauma of the last weeks, and the horror of the wolves that had run through his home.

When the food was gone, and Mikasa set the bowl down on the floor, Eren curled up around himself, and laid his head on his knees, trying to shake off the memories. Yet it seemed like the harder he tried to run from it all, the more vivid it got. He could feel the animal on top of him. He could feel Hannes carrying him away. He could feel everything, and smell the blood under the scent of the gas station, and the remnants of the broth clinging to the edges of the bowl.

It gripped his chest, and squeezed, leaving him helpless and alone despite everything around him.

Mikasa held him when he started crying. Her arms felt safe around him. Safe, and comforting as he tried to pretend it was his mother's cooking he'd just finished.

There was something bitter in the pit of his stomach. Something violent that curled within him, and clawed to get out passed the healthy things that surrounded him for the moment.

He was going to kill them. He was going to kill every one. He'd put them in shallow graves under the stars, and mash their bones to pulp. He thought of the back of the man who had stood up from the form of the beast. He'd kill every last werewolf in the world.


	8. Chapter 8

Eren got stronger quickly. Reiner took him out running in the hills when he'd regained his feet, and continued to teach him how to use a gun.

Bert watched with an odd detached feeling. Eren worried him. There were moments where the boy didn't seem to be the same kid they'd first taken in. Moments where he was some dark and vengeful creature. Reiner didn't seem to notice, though, and Annie never said anything, so Bert held his tongue.

It wasn't his place in the pack to speak out of turn.

They still didn't see either Jean or Marco, but their scents remained on the wind, speaking to their proximity. It made Bert nervous in a way that even being surrounded by the pack couldn't drown out.

Eren moved into their room after a while, when Annie had complained enough times about boy smell. Mikasa stayed with Annie though, never willing to be too far from Eren's side. Armin was the only one of the human pack that ever left, and he did so to go back to his Grandfather's for clothing, or books, or just to check in with the old man.

It made Bert jealous. He missed going home to his parents after spending days at Reiner's house.

There was an antsy air in the gas station. It was something that began to creep up in their sleep, and seize them by the throats, and it was Eren. Bert knew it was Eren. It was the way that the boy stared vacantly out the kitchen window some nights, and it was the way he slept on Reiner's cot while Reiner pushed into Bertholdt's bed without complaint.

They were never alone with their own anymore. Their secrets were never allowed to air between them. They were covered, and tamped down so hard that he could feel them stretching, and aching beneath his skin, begging to be allowed to run free.

And he wanted to fuck Reiner so bad in was killing him.

Nerves got that sort of a response from him though. Sex was a release, one he'd been horribly denied. He hadn't even gotten kisses. Not real ones. Just stolen ones when no one was looking. And the worst part was knowing that Reiner wanted it too.

Reiner wanted it too, but Eren was always there being nerve wracking, and strange, but devout in his desire to continue training.

Bert held his tongue. It wasn't his place in the pack to speak out of turn.

He busied himself with staying far away from Eren, and Mikasa, and by proxy Reiner. He spent his time with Armin, talking about the differences in the places they came from, learning, and teaching, and never being truthful. And he spent his time skirting the perimeter of their territory, making sure that no one unwelcome felt the need to intervene in their business.

Jean and Marco were close after all. The pack needed to be protected.

Luckily Annie was of the same mindset. That was something that set him a bit at ease. At least he wasn't alone in these worries.

It was a full week after Eren had shown up injured that he and Reiner actually found time. The moon was waxing again, and it set into their skin like as a restlessness that Eren was only just coming to understand. They met out in the woods, and pushed each other against trees before they found their way to the ground.

The bites were harder than normal from the pent up nature of their last few days, and the compounding feeling of things going wrong in every way possible. Reiner hit harder, and scratched deeper, leaving bigger bruises to heal up just a bit more slowly than the norm. But it wasn't a problem. It was a relief.

They limped home just in time for dinner, Annie's cooking, and Annie's kill. They'd asked her to handle the affair, and she'd been surprisingly willing.

Eren and Armin rushed them at the kitchen door.

"Where have you guys been?" Eren asked loudly. "There's been crazy animals in the woods for hours. We thought you got eaten!"

They looked to Annie who shrugged, and took another bite of her venison steak. Armin's eyes fell hard on the bite marks stretching up Bert's neck, and ruminated curiously on them as Bert tried to play the whole thing off.

"We were out settin' up some traps for tomorrow," Reiner said as he sat down at the table in his usual spot.

Mikasa and Annie were eating, so he didn't hesitate to take a large bite out of a piece of bread.

"Excuse me," Armin said, yanking the bread out of Reiner's hand as he went to take a second bite. "It'll only be a moment."

Bert eyed him warily as he approached with the bread, unsure what he was about to attempt. He tugged twice on the larger boy's flannel over shirt, asking for Bert to lean over, and held the bite mark in the bread up against the bruises on his neck.

The whole room was quiet as Bert silently had a conniption. What would the humans do, he wondered. What would they do now that it was out? Reiner made a soft noise in the back of his throat, and scooted his chair back from the table almost reflexively.

Were they about to be thrown out of the human society? Would they have to find somewhere else to go?

Annie set her fork down, still chewing slowly.

"Watchu sayin', you never gnaw on your friends' necks, Armin?" she asked.

"Not really," he told her, pulling the bread away, and handing it back to Reiner, who looked at it as if it had just staged a coup. "Are you two dating?" he asked then.

Eren looked confused and lost. Mikasa watched with detached interest.

"Something like that," Reiner said finally making up his mind, and deciding to eat the bread anyway.

Annie coughed awkwardly, and Eren reeled as if he hadn't put two and two together before the question was asked properly. Reiner eyed Armin as if he'd found a plague rat in the pantry. The silence stretched uneasily.

Bert took a moment before rolling his shoulders, swallowing his nerves, and sitting down at the table. Armin continued to watch them, mulling things over in his over-intelligent mind. Bert didn't want to think about it. He set to eating, and tried to block it out, not looking at Reiner, not looking at anyone.

Eren sat across from him looking dumbfounded, and confused.

"What do you mean, 'something like that'?" Armin asked when he was properly seated again, and the silence had dragged on too long for everyone's liking.

Bert pushed his food nervously around his plate, and neglected to say anything, feeling sweat bead up at his hairline, and on his chest beneath his shirt.

"We never been on a date," Reiner said to his fork. Beside Bert, Mikasa shifted awkwardly. "Basically we just fuck."

Bert nodded when he felt Armin, and Eren both look at him. He was glad, though, that Eren's strange new aloofness wasn't showing at the moment. It only would have added another edge to this sharp, and uncomfortable situation.

"How long?" Armin asked.

"D'you know that's really none of your business?" Annie interjected, leaning over the table a bit, and tipping the salt over. It fell in a haphazard line between Bert, and the two boys, scattering out to the edges of the table, and bouncing beneath the lips of plates.

It was a welcome gesture. An old one from the mountains, and their people. Annie had salted the earth to kill the crops of discontent that were feeding the conversation. She had cleansed the table of Bertholdt's uneasiness. Reiner's shoulders slumped a bit, loosing their stiffness.

The significance of the act seemed lost on the other three people at the table however, and Bert found himself rushing to explain that Annie had simply asked that they bring the conversation to a close as Reiner scraped what salt he could into his palm, and laid it in a pile on the edge of his plate. There was no reason to waste a resource, after all.

After that the conversation turned to sexuality. Bert found himself fascinated to finally understand why gay was occasionally thrown around as an insult by humans. Reiner looked bitter when Armin spoke about hate crimes. It was better to have words to describe themselves though, to have confirmation that it wasn't some freak accident of nature.

Armin told Bert about studies into the biological significance of homosexuality as a widespread occurrence in the animal kingdom. He spoke about movements, and the people who had started them. Revolutions had lead gay men, and women into the light, but even they hadn't always been so forward thinking.

Bert was enraptured by it all. Drawn in by the idea that there were places he and Reiner could hold hands, or kiss in public without having to worry too much. There were niches carved into the bedrock of human society just for people like them. They weren't alone. If it came to the worst, and they weren't welcome at home anymore, they would be able to find somewhere.

It was a lot of worrying laid to rest. Laid to rest with them in their bed, when Reiner curled up at his side, and they listened to Eren's breaths slow to deep, wavering notes of hush on the air.

They made a short game of nipping at each other's noses before sleep crept up, and wrested them down into unconsciousness.

Bert was warm that whole night cradled between Reiner, and the wall, but in the morning he was alone. The gas station was silent, and the silence stretch out to all the walls, making his lack of company palpable enough to take company's place. He strained his ears, and heard Reiner's rifle in the distance. Likely in Eren's ever more capable hands.

The light was low on the horizon, so he pulled himself out of bed slowly, watching the sun rise out the window. Annie was likely taking step of their territory, making sure that threats were kept at bay.

He stretched his arms out over his head, and took a deep breath. It was a hopeful morning. A morning that allowed him to hope that tomorrow would be the same.

Reiner's rifle fired in the distance, and he listened hard enough to catch the other boy laughing.


	9. Chapter 9

Marco had been hunting his whole life. He'd started in the vast openness of the midwest, and moved to city underbellies. He'd hunted vampires, and demons, and obscure Celtic fairies. He'd killed things that immigrated to the united states, and he'd killed things that were native to it. It wasn't as if this was his first time hunting down a werewolf.

And yet something was off.

Despite the lore surrounding werewolves, all of Marco's intel- that which his father had gained, and that which he had gained himself- spoke of mindless beasts who reached half transformations against their own will for the three days surrounding the full moon. During this time they lost their human autonomy, and fell prey to their animal minds. They were violent, volatile, and vicious. They had no ability to differentiate human from animal, and they attacked anything that wasn't their pack without thought.

But this was different.

All of the signs Marco could read pointed towards werewolves. The claw marks, and the locations of the injuries. The blood splatters at the crime scene, and the footprints in the mud outside it. Human feet with elongated claws.

Then there were the implications of autonomy, and full transformation. The hints of a methodical pack dynamic. The hints of an ability to regain humanity at will.

Something was wrong.

If this had been a normal werewolf pack, the Yeager house would not have been the only one hit. The wolves would have run through the neighborhood eating cats, and trash, and killing anything that got in their way.

Instead it was a single house. A single house with a single, distinct target. Marco would have thought that Eren had been the one to do it, if there weren't clear indications that the pack had been comprised of adults. Adults who had had numbers, and logic on their side.

It made him antsy. The more he learned, the more nervous he got. Jean was right. They should just finish this as soon as possible, and get back to his father as fast as they could.

But nothing was adding up. They were missing pieces of the puzzle. They were missing Eren Yeager.

So they did the only thing they could, and continued to attempt to track the boy. And, as always, everything lead back to the gas station. The gas station, and the strange group of kids working there.

They were able to spot Eren from afar, and honestly, he looked healthy. Reiner had a habit of taking him up into the woods with a rifle, and shooting cans with him. Jean made a few comments about Reiner's ability to shoot being stereotypical.

His laughter had gotten Reiner to turn, and sniff the air. Looking for them. He was looking for them.

That was the moment. It was the realization. Marco took a deep breath, and swallowed.

"Jean, he can hear us," he said, and he felt Jean's body stiffen, heard the other boy swallow hard.

Reiner's hand found Eren's shoulder, and pulled the boy close. There was a ripple in the fabric of his shirt caused by the motion. Something that was just enough to bare a large, pink scar on the kids shoulder, reaching up his neck a bit. There was nothing definitive about it, but Marco's gut told him that it had been a bite. It had been a bite before it was what it was now.

"We need to leave now," he said, pushing the binoculars into Jean's hands, and turning. His boots crunched hard on the dirt, and leaves, and he could practically feel Reiner tracking him as he moved.

Werewolves had enhanced senses. Sight, hearing, scent. All of it was heightened. That he knew, but he'd never before seen an example of it manifesting in the wolf's human form, and life. It seemed strange. Maybe this was some different breed. Maybe there was a reason for this. He had so many questions running through his head it was hard to concentrate on running.

He felt like he could feel the animal gaining on him. He felt like he was the one being hunted suddenly. Jean's breaths beside him were something comforting. He wasn't alone.

The car loomed before them, a safe haven in a place of terror. Marco reached for it, key's jingling in his hand as he shoved them into the door. Jean was asking questions as he slid into the passenger's seat. Questions that Marco couldn't answer until they were safely away. Somewhere out of ear shot. Somewhere outside of the wolves' territory.

He drove like Reiner was on their six. Like he was going to be late for a job interview. Like he could feel the three of them breathing down the back of his neck savagely. Beside him, Jean's knuckles turned white from gripping the center console, and his breath caught hard in his throat.

Marco slowed down once they were back on proper roads with proper rules, and more of a chance to get pulled over by police.

"Tell me what the fuck is going on," Jean demanded as Marco did the math. Reiner was about six foot, and likely around 190 to 200 pounds, which would read as a full grown adult if all one had to go by was his footprints. Bert was taller, but thinner, and though he was likely lighter, still seemed full grown if one wasn't looking at his face.

It could have been them. The tracks could have been them. But why? What was the motivation? It seemed so arbitrary, and odd. And then why the wolfsbane? Wolfsbane was something to keep wolves away. It was something to keep the beasts from knocking on your door. Did it have some other meaning out south? Why would werewolves have, and cultivate something that had been used to kill them for centuries?

Was it like racial slurs? Were they taking it back? Was it some reclaiming of a horrifying substance?

"What the fuck is going on, Marco?" Jean asked again.

"They're the wolves! The gas station kids are the wolves!" he blurted, fumbling to turn the radio off, sick, and tired of hearing the traffic report for a freeway they weren't even on.

Jean looked like he'd suddenly put all the pieces together as well. "No, that makes sense," he said.

And honestly, it did. Marco didn't know how he'd missed it earlier. It was so obvious. He cursed hindsight.

Still, there were things that didn't add up. There were things that were missing, and they continued to sit in the car once they'd pulled into the motel parking lot, staring at the dashboard, trying to work out the little missing pieces in their heads.

Marco had been in werewolf dens before. They were the places that packs congregated around full moons while they were in their trances. They tended to be filled with animal furs, but not tanned hides. They'd line the corners of the room with down, and feathers from birds, and the bones from kills that were never fully cleaned off. The ones that hadn't been small enough to be eaten.

They were much akin to the dens of actual wolves, and they tended to be somewhere that the wolves themselves did not consciously know about during their every day lives. Just like their enhanced senses, and often the members of their pack whom they would not recognize on any level other than the animal.

It didn't make sense. These children were too self aware. And now they had Eren. They had Eren, who was probably one of them, and did he even know what had happened, was he preparing for the inevitable?

Marco screamed, and slammed the sides of his fists into the steering wheel. It was so frustrating. It was so infuriating. He didn't know what to do. All he could do was trust his information.

He knew about werewolves. He knew what they hunted, and how they moved. They were always predictable in their personal brand of unpredictability. He took a deep breath, and pushed the air out of his nose.

They had to get Eren out of there, and make sure he was turned. They had to either save him from them, or from himself. It was the only ethical thing to do.

"Get everything ready," Marco said to the wheel's center plate. "We go after them on the full moon, and we make sure they don't kill anyone else."

Maybe he was being hasty, but the only proof he needed was their transformation, and his gut was never wrong.

They packed guns, and throwing knives. They packed distilled aconite poisons, and they waited. It would be disorienting to spread their scents out through the entire territory, and it would be easier to do that while the pack was asleep. Then they could strike. It would have to be at night so they didn't alert the civilians in the proximity.

They would a night to act. A single night, and not much longer. The place would be crawling with cops afterwards. For days. Possibly even for weeks.

They started making circles of the presumed territory as soon as the moon was starting to show signs of heavy pregnancy in the sky. They planted traps where they could, and pissed on trees to confuse the wolves.

The wolves would have the benefit of night vision, but it would even out due to modern innovations of science. Night vision goggles would be necessary in the woods in the dark.

It was the last sunset before the first day of the full moon, and the tension in Marco's back hadn't eased a bit since his revelation. He wanted to be wrong. He wanted so badly to be wrong. Jean was quiet beside him, goggles dropped over his eyes, and ears pricked for any sign of movement.

"We should get into position," he said. The moon would be rising soon, and with it, so would the wolves. They could likely smell the threat. It would draw them out, and put them on edge, and like the animals they were, they would be disoriented by the fact that it came from all around.

Marco patted Jean on the shoulder, and the other boy caught his hand, holding on for a moment.

Their nerves were higher strung than usual. There was still that feeling that something was wrong. It was creeping into their bones, and along their spines.

"Stay safe," he begged quietly.

The smile Marco gave him was the brightest he could manage, cheeks pushing up into his eyes. "I'll be fine," he reassured. "We've only done this a thousand times."

Jean's face was open, and empty, and filled with fear for a moment before Marco laughed, and did something truly crazy by leaning in to kiss him. Their mouths only met for a second, and he could feel Jean's shock, and inhibitions in every bit of it. Jean's hands held tight to him when he tried to pull away, but the moon was cresting the mountains, and they needed to move.

"I'll see you in the morning," he said, bounding away from the other boy, smile still wide on his face. The terror of the night seemed gone then, replaced by a giddy hopefulness for the morning. They would deal with the pests, and they would secure the safety of the town, and then Marco would get to kiss Jean as often as he wanted to.

He was the one who sent up the noise flare. He was the one who crouched in the grass, and listened as the first howl sounded in response. The wolves were moving for them. Excitement pooled in Marco's throat, and the underneath of his jaw, waiting to do what he'd been put on this earth to do- dispel the darkness that most people thought was just childish dreams so that they didn't need to know it was more.

A second howl joined the first, and then a third, calling out locations, and information, intentionally disorienting prey as the sound bounced off the trees, and rocks, and echoed into the night.

Marco ran the tips of his arrows through aconite, and waited against the trunk of the tree he was hidden beneath. It would be a long night.


	10. Chapter 10

It sounded like a thousand bats had all been set on fire and let loose into the night sky. Reiner jolted up from the kitchen table where he'd been watching Bert do a crossword puzzle. The sound arched over their heads, and exploded like a fire cracker in the night.

He tasted the air, and caught the stench of human urine, and anger. They had come back, and this time they'd come back with a vengeance.

He'd been waiting for this since the day he'd caught them in the woods. He'd known this was coming.

He turned to Armin, and Mikasa, eyes wide. "Keep Eren inside!" he said harshly.

"Why?" Mikasa asked. He could see her hackles rising as he reached for the rifle he'd left by the kitchen door.

"They're in the woods," he said, not bothering to elaborate on who they were. She tried desperately to get him to tell her how he knew, but he wouldn't answer. Eren looked jittery by the window, head turning every which way as he tried to differentiate the scents. Reiner had to admit they were good. If he'd been a puppy he'd be all turned around too.

Annie unfurled a roll of combat and hunting knives on the table, throwing a harness over her back, and straps around her thighs to sheath them on her body. Bertholdt pulled the guns out of the high cabinet over the pantry, and began checking them over as quickly as he could.

Armin and Mikasa watched in horrified awe.

"The traps were set properly?" Reiner asked his pack at large.

Annie grunted her response as she checked the string on her crossbow.

"Good," Reiner said, loading his rifle. "We got them in the dark, and we know these woods. We got them at a landslide of disadvantages. Numbers. Size. Strength. They'll come at us hard, but we'll come at them harder. We got no time to bitch around this, Bert, so you nut up, or shut up and get left behind. I know we've never been in an active combat situation before, but that don't mean we ain't ready for this. If anyone ain't ready it's those pieces of afterbirth out there, so we're moving, and we're moving fast."

"Moon with you," Annie said as she stuffed the last of her arrows back into her hip quiver.

"With you too," Reiner replied, slapping Bert on the arm, sliding a couple of extra guns into a holster, and throwing it on.

Bert didn't say a word. He hooked the strap on his rifle over his shoulder, and followed Reiner out the door. He paused a moment, grabbing hold of the other boy's shirt, and pulling him back. "You'll live?" he asked nervously.

"'Course," Reiner told him, but he knew how Bert felt. That same fear was eating him up inside. What if one of them didn't make it? "You will too," he assured as if his words could stave off something as inevitable, and unknown as death itself. "I'll see you in the morning," he said softly, drawing up closer, and nipping at the boy's earlobe.

Bert nodded, and nipped at his cheek before they parted.

Annie threw up the first howl once they'd spread out. A way to measure their distance from one another, and make sure they could keep each other in their sights while still covering as much ground as possible. It was also a way to make the human's heads turn. Their sounds would echo off the mountain, and the trees, and vibrate in every flower, making them seem as all encompassing as the spread scent made the others seem.

He checked cautiously on Bert when they began their run, and met the other boy's eyes. In the morning this would all seem like a bad dream. In the morning they'd still have a future, and there wouldn't be another Berik. He told himself that, but it didn't stop his mind from giving him the worst possible outcome.

He had the world to loose. He had everything to loose.

He could smell the steel of human traps, and called out a series of half barks as he found his paws for an extra burst of speed. The harness was tight around his wolf's chest, but it had been made to stretch, and encompass the change.

He heard Annie, and Bert on four feet as well, could smell their fur under the scent of earth, and human. He tried to think about what Berik would have done, and repeatedly came to the same answer.

Berik would have protected the pack, and killed the threat. Quickly. Efficiently. Nothing personal. This was not the time or the place for emotions.

A rock tumbled down the embankment ahead of him, and he caught sight of one of them. Marco was standing at the base of a tree, holding a bow, arrow strung, aim one Reiner's muzzle. Reiner dodged around his side, and regained his human form yanking the bow from the other boy's hands.

Marco pulled it back, using the arrow as an improvised knife, and stabbing Reiner in the arm. He smelled the aconite too late to do anything about it, and surged forward, pinning the boy against the tree.

"Why?" he asked, as he pressed against Marco's clavicle, restricting his breathing.

"You killed Carla Yeager, and you turned her son."

"What evidence do you have?" Reiner bellowed, slamming him harder against the tree's trunk, and watching him struggle to pull breath. He was wearing goggles. Reiner ripped them from his face, and threw them on the ground, watching him blink, stunned in the moonlight. "What proof?" he yelled. "What reason?"

"I don't know how your minds work, I'm not an animal!" He screamed back.

Jean's gun came out of nowhere, Pulling Reiner's head back into the smaller boy's chest, and cutting off his air as it squished up into his throat. Marco's knee found his groin, and he pulled the arrow further through his arm, making blood splatted on the ground, and further tattering his shirt.

He reached for a knife at his waist, and Reiner watched for a moment before Bertholdt slammed into them, huge, and black, and snarling.

Jean shouted, and jumped back. He swung his gun around, and trained it on Bert's face, screaming, "What the fuck?"

"What the fuck? What the fuck, Marco! You said half transformations! Like Wolf Man! Not like this!"

Bert opened his mouth, and clamped his jaws down hard on the barrel of Jean's gun as Reiner struggled to tie off his bleeding arm.

Marco readied another arrow, Training it on Bert's temples as the gun came back out of his jaws crumpled, and covered in blood. Reiner saw broken teeth begin to regrow themselves as he swung his leg up, and kicked Marco's bow.

He misfired, sending his arrow off into the distance, and Reiner shifted back, scrambling away with Bert on his heels.

They could hear Annie running circles. She let out another howl as they fenced the humans in.

"Jean, I'm blind," Marco yelled as they tightened their ranks around them, still just out of sight.

Jean had dropped his gun, and was reaching for a pistol at his side when Annie rushed him, fast, and angry, her jaws clipping at the straps on his thighs that held his knives secure.

He shouted out, and reached for her, but she was already gone, taking back to the deeper shadows, and readying her crossbow.

They were using the same poisons. They were fighting with the same tools. Reiner felt his body start to go a bit numb, and hoped there wasn't enough in his system to overwhelm his healing.

Annie's shot caught Jean's cheek, grazing it, and sending blood flying. He shouted, harsh, and brash above the sound of their hard breathing.

Reiner could hear his heart beat. He could hear Bertholdt, and the sound of Annie's muscles straining as she readied another shot. He listened hard, and stretched his ears to check for weaknesses. The sound of stilted steps where old injuries could be set in bones, and muscles.

And then it came again. Bright, and loud, screaming through his head, and into his ears. It mingled in him with the poison his body was attempting to overrun, and he ran into a tree. His hearing was filled with a shrill ringing, and his sight left him altogether so that he lost his footing in the underbrush, and crashed onto his chest, and face.

His paws were dirt crusted, and there was a feeling of cold that set into him as his chest began to hurt. His heart was beating too fast. He could feel it speeding, and fluttering in a way that was entirely unnatural. He pushed himself up, vision coming back, hearing ringing in his ears, and vomited. Bertholdt was saying something, asking questions he couldn't answer, pushing in his chest. He needed to change back, but he couldn't will his body to cooperate. It left him stranded, and unable to communicate properly, his limbs weak, and numb.

The forest was coming back though. At least that. Jean, and Marco were gone, but at least he was able to see.

His paws set beneath him, and he struggled to push himself up, and limp away from the vomit. Bert's hands were a distant echo on his fur, sliding along his back, and down his haunches as he managed to pull himself out of reach. He vomited again, still disoriented from the sudden sound, and light, and leaned against the trunk of a tree.

Marco came out of nowhere, a blade arching down, and cutting along Bert's shoulder. Bert reached behind him, and grabbed, holding him by the arm. Reiner could smell the blood, and the sweat. And through the ringing in his ears, he heard them shouting wordlessly at one another.

He gathered his strength, and in a last ditch attempt to protect Bert leaped over his head, paws striking Marco in the chest, and weight carrying them both down to the ground where they landed with a hard thump, rolling in the dirt, and the bile.

Marco regained his feet first, knife still in hand, arm arching up so that the moonlight caught the flat of his blade. Reiner took a deep breath, paws scrambling again, digits elongating back out into fingers just as Bert slammed into Marco's arm, teeth flashing angrily.

Reiner's chest was tight, and he reached for his throat desperately, pulling at his own skin to try, and allow the air back in. He coughed, and gasped, and writhed despite the weakness, and the numb feeling in everything.

"You're killing him!" Bert yelled, slamming into Marco again, pushing him, so that he fell, and tumbled along the ground once more. "You're killing him for no reason! What did we even do to you?"

"What did you do to Carla Yeager?" Jean asked, a shot firing. Reiner saw it hit Bert in the back of the shoulder, watched the boy cringe, and cower as he turned from the hunter he was aggressing to the hunter who was aggressing him.

"Nothing," he hissed. He changed in a flash, paws hitting the ground, and propelling him forward with snarls.

Reiner caught his foot in the dirt, and tried to pushing himself back along the ground as Marco stood up again, panting.

He hadn't seen the pistol before, but the minute he heard the clasps on it's holster snap open, he knew he was going to die.

He was going to die, and there wouldn't be any morning after. He would be the next Berik, taken out of the world before he was ready, before he'd had a proper chance.

He wheezed hard, and pushed again, dirt grinding into the flannel of his shirt, and wrapping cold tendrils around him.

Annie came crashing out of nowhere, pushing Marco down to the ground again, hands flailing as her knees pinned his elbows down.

"My pack!" She screamed, "You're hurting my pack, and you think you can get away with it?"

Air was coming back. He felt his lungs start to relax, and the numbness start to fade out, and he gasped hard to refill his body, hands spasming in the dirt.

He heard it when Marco's knife stabbed into Annie's side, and got caught. He watched as she started back, and off him, pulling it out to use it as her own weapon.

She was scared. Reiner could smell the fear, and he could smell the blood. Human, and wolf.

The howl caught them off guard. The rushing sound of paws in the dirt, and Armin yelling in the distance. Everyone stopped, and froze as a brown wolf rushed into sight, panting hard, teeth bared.

"Run," Reiner said harshly. "Run!" he yelled, scrambling in the dirt to regain his feet.

Marco, and Jean looked at each other in what was likely panic before listening. They ran. All five of them ran, feet slipping on the ground, beneath the weight of their fatigue, and pain. And when they couldn't increase the distance between them, and the wolf, they scrambled into trees, and held tight to the branches, offering hands down to those still trying to get away from him.

Reiner found himself hauling Jean up into the tree, the other boy's hands wrapped tight around his forearms, goggles emotionless above his gaping mouth.

"You're wobbly," he said, as Reiner braced himself back against the tree's trunk.

"Poisoned arrow," Reiner told him, still taking deep, panicked breaths. Jean's head inclined toward his biceps, where his shirt was ripped enough to show a bleeding, open wound. Reiner failed to mention that it was courtesy of Jean's boyfriend.

"Is that Eren?" he asked.

Reiner nodded. "New turns are crazed. They have no control. They tend to lose themselves in the wolf."

Eren paced, and slobbered, and howled at the base of the tree, digging frantically at the bark, and the roots.

"Bert? Annie?" Reiner called out.

"We're fine," Bert called back. "I think there's a bullet in my shoulder though."

Reiner took a huge, relieved breath. "I hope he didn't bite Armin, or Mikasa," he said to the branches above him. Eren snarled, and rushed the tree, hitting it hard with his shoulder, and neck.

"When were you turned?" Jean asked.

"I wasn't," Reiner told him. "I've been this way all my life."

"Monsters aren't born, they're made," Jean hissed.

Reiner fixed him with a hard glare. "If it wasn't against our laws, I would bite you, and your little fucking boyfriend, and watch how you dealt with bein' something you seem to hate so bad."

"Your laws?"

"As it is, though, I ain't gonna kill you. I'm just gonna sit here, and hate your guts for shooting my best friend in the back, you deformed miscarriage."

Jean flinched, and turned, looking around. "Marco?" he called out. Eren howled.

"I'm good," Marco called back. Reiner looked, and caught sight of the boy in another tree.

"You're terrible!" he yelled over the sound of Eren's insanity. He tried to keep the fear in his throat down. Eren sounded like the one who'd killed Berik, and it made him want to scream when it dragged images back to the surface. "You're all the worst! You're the reason we hide! You're the reason we don't talk to humans! You're the reason we live scared every day, and practice drills where we burn our homes to the ground, and run! You're the problem! All of you! You've killed us for thousands of years! You've killed us for no reason! Just like now! Why are you doing this? Why? We didn't do anything!"

He could see Berik's leg being torn off, and shaken as he punched at the monster's eyes, and nose. He could see the blood on the snow. The pink drool that dripped from the beast's mouth.

"Why?" he asked. "Why? I don't understand! We wanted to help him! We wanted to make sure he didn't do anything he'd regret, but you made us leave him, and now he might have killed his own pack! Now they might be dead, and that's on you!"

He heard Bertholdt's breathing steadying, and Annie's fingernails clenching in the bark beneath her feet.

Jean's face fell. He looked down at Eren awkwardly, and pondered for a moment before swearing.

"God, what was on that arrow?" he asked, touching his cheek. "My face is numb."

"Same as was on yours," Annie answered back. "And you've got no right to cry. Mine didn't cut you deep enough for it to really bitch you around. Look at Reiner, and be grateful you're not worse off."

Eren jumped, teeth clashing shut on the air beneath Reiner's feet. "How long to sun?" he asked, head lolling back against the tree. He still felt weak, but now instead of numbness it was pain that was setting into his limbs.

"Eight hours, I'd say," Bert said, looking up through the branches at the slight silhouette of the moon hanging high in the sky.

"Cunt," Reiner swore. His head was still spinning a bit from everything. Still spinning, and his muscles were still weak. He felt himself slide over, and didn't even have the energy to try and right himself when Jean caught him by the good arm. His fingers dug into the muscle, and pulled him back.

"Are you dying?" he asked. Reiner tried to fix him with a hard glare.

"I ain't dyin' before the sun rise," he bit. "Not on account of two good for nothing puppy hunters. I got someone I promised."

Jean looked at Marco, and licked his lips.

"Let's call a truce," he said. "We don't kill each other until morning."

Reiner's eyes narrowed. "How do I know I can trust you."

"You'll have my word."

"You're word's worth the afterbirth of my sixth child. I invited you into my home, and you lied to my face."

Jean had the decency to at least look ashamed. "I promise," he insisted.

Reiner regarded him warily, but he knew he didn't really have a choice but to agree. "You kill us, and it's war between you, and ours," he said as a last warning. "And ours are stronger together you ever will be."

Jean nodded. It was all the understanding they really needed.


	11. Chapter 11

The morning came in shafts of light that speared down slowly through the canopy of leaves. Reiner woke up with Jean holding him back against the trunk of their unlikely savior. His body ached, but the cut in his arm was healed over smooth. That's where he found the other boy's eyes. Staring, as if transfixed by the fact that it had closed itself up.

He remembered stories about humans being weak, and not stitching themselves back together fast enough sometimes. That tended to be why they died so easily, if he recalled correctly.

It was eerily quiet until he stretched his ears further, and heard Bert whimpering. "Hold still," Annie hissed before there was an odd, wet noise, and Bert gasped. "Went pretty deep, didn't it?" she asked. Bert made a sound of agreement, and Reiner heard something small, and metal fall to the forest floor beneath them. He assumed it was the bullet Jean had lodged in Bert's shoulder. That's when he looked down, and saw Eren in the tattered remains of his clothing, passed out, and human on the ground.

He looked beat up, and bruised, like he'd been fighting to the last minute before his body gave in to exhaustion. Reiner grimaced, and pushed Jean's hand off him.

"We gotta get this idiot home, and make sure he didn't make too much of a mess," he said, sliding out of the branches, and scooping Eren up into his arms. He still felt weak, but not too weak. It wasn't enough to make him unable to stand even under the weight of the possibility of there being two dead bodies waiting for him when he got home.

Marco slid down out of his tree like a snake, alighting on the ground with barely a crunch, but Reiner heard the steel of his pistol move through the air and train on his back. His lips curled up into a snarl as he turned around.

Jean jumped down as well, standing unarmed, and looking nervously between the two of them. Anxiety filled the air, smelling heavy, and bitter.

"I'd like to know who killed Carla Yeager just as much as you would," he bit over Eren's head where it rested limply beneath his jaw.

Bert's massive, black wolf leapt to the ground, hackles raised behind Marco. Annie seemed small beside him, golden fur catching the few rays of sun that managed to fall through onto the forest floor.

"I think you already know," Marco said. "But more importantly, you're going to give me Eren. Right. Now."

Reiner pulled Eren tighter to his chest, curling down around him. "Like that'll ever happen. Eren needs to be with his own kind now so he can learn how to control himself."

"There's no controlling a monster!" Marco shouted. Reiner watched him thumb the safety, eyes wide, breath caught hard in his throat.

Bert growled loud and low as Marco's eyes flicked from Eren to Reiner, and back again. He swung around faster than Reiner could properly register, and pulled the trigger. The shot rang loud in his ears as the bullet bit into Bert's neck, dropping him on the spot.

"Bertholdt!" Reiner called just as Marco yelled for Jean.

Reiner felt the boy hit his shoulder, tackling him to the ground, and wrapped himself around Eren's unconscious body, trying to cradle his head. His temple bounced on the dirt, and he skidded, still holding tight to the new turn. Jean sat up, straddling his side, and began showering his head, and neck in punches.

Bert was whining in a terrifying, gurgling way. Reiner could hear his legs scrambling on the ground. They'd made it to the morning. They'd met their promises to one another. How ironic that it would be then they would finally found themselves nailed into the ground.

"Get Eren!" Marco shouted, turning and catching Annie full across the chest. Her jaws opened, and snapped a centimeter from the boy's throat before she shifted back, and bounded onto her feet. Reiner saw her drop into stance, and knew it was over.

He pulled his shoulders up around his ears, and closed his eyes against the fists hitting his face. He had to protect Eren. There was no telling what Marco and Jean would do with him. There was no trusting them. They were humans. They were hunters. They were monsters.

He listened to Bert bleed, and Annie swipe Marco's legs out from under him. Then she was on Jean, catching him in the face with a shin.

"Get the fuck out before I call up the mountain!" She screamed. "Run! Run now!"

Jean stared at her, nose bleeding, and Annie threw her head back, letting out a howl. Her voice echoed far through the trees, tumbling around corners, and vibrating into their ear drums.

Reiner heard car alarms begin blaring in the distance. He heard dogs barking, and howling, and throwing themselves against gates. Eren woke up, green eyes wide, and pushed hard against Reiner's arms desperately.

He held tight to the boy as he looked over at Bert, now human, clutching hard at the blood spurting out of his neck, eyes wide. He felt sick. It had been a long time since he'd seen a member of his pack so injured, and the need to be by Bert's side was something that thrummed through him stronger than the pulsing of his own heart. He couldn't though. Eren was still unreliably effected by the moon, and by Annie's call.

Jean lurched to his feet, hands held up before him in surrender. "No more fighting! No more fighting, I promise," he said. Annie's narrow eyes fixed on him.

"Tell that to your mate," she said. Marco was clutching his ribs, breathing hard, kneeling on the ground. "Go now, before our elders get here," she said deep in her throat. "If your scent is still on the wind by the time they taste it, you'll find yourselves hunted for the rest of your lives."

It was a bluff. A complete bluff. Perhaps the dogs, and the coyotes had heard her, but there was no way that the village had, and on the off chance that the wind was right to carry it all the way up, it was likely they would think nothing of it. The bluff was working though.

It was working well enough that Jean scrambled over to Marco, and hauled him up by his arm. "No!" Marco protested as Jean pulled him away. "No, we can't go back empty handed!"

"It's not worth this," Jean argued. "It's not worth dying! I don't know about you, but I want us to live!"

"This isn't over!" Marco gave them. One last angry warning before Jean started to drag him away.

"Take Eren," Reiner said then, gathering himself to his feet, and shoving him into Annie's arms. She clutched his shoulders, and held him still as Reiner scrambled over to Bert.

His knees ached when they hit the ground, and he reached out to the other boy. The blood was still pooling around his fingers, dark, and red when Reiner began trying to add pressure, afraid that it would cause the blood to well up in Bert's throat, and make him choke. He checked Bert's mouth, and found that the walls of his esophagus had already reconstituted. A relief he wasn't able to linger on long.

"It'll heal," he promised. "It'll heal. Just give it a little time," he said softly, holding on tight. He could feel the skin trying desperately to stitch itself back together beneath his palms. Bert's eyes were still wide, unfocused. He latched onto Reiner's wrist, and held tight, smearing it with red. "I love you, okay? I love you, and you're gonna make it."

Bert tried to nod, but it only made everything worse. Blood raced through Reiner's finger as he panicked. "Oh shit! I need something to stop the bleeding! I need something to stop the bleeding! He's not healing fast enough!"

He heard Jean, and Marco come to a stop, and stare on for a moment as he bore down harder on the wound. The bullet had gone right through. In one side of Bert's neck, and out the other, narrowly missing his spine. Reiner rocked softly as he pulled the other boy into his lap.

He didn't want to cry, but he couldn't see a good outcome for this. He bit down on his lip hard, and took a deep, steadying breath through his nose. And then Jean was next to him, pulling bandages out of a pouch on his hip, and pushing at Reiner's hands.

He growled for a moment before he realized what the human was trying to do, and let him. There was a certain nervousness about putting Bert's life into someone else's hands.

"Why?" Marco asked.

"I can't. I just can't, okay. They're not doing anything wrong, and we know it. You've gotta get over everything, and realize that right now," Jean said. Bert started at the feeling of unfamiliar hands, holding tighter to Reiner's wrist.

Annie was doing something behind them, and he heard her voice pitched low, speaking to Eren, though he didn't have the mind to make the words out.

"Besides," Jean said as the bandages began to stain. "There's clearly a lot we don't know. This could be beneficial. Maybe we could- I don't know. Maybe we could help them rather than just assuming they're all lost causes. We could help. That's why you hunt, right? To help?"

There was a pause before Marco was there too, kneeling down on Reiner's other side, and nodding. "Alright," He said softly. "How do we fix this?"

They managed to slow the bleeding, and get Bert back to the gas station with Jean and Marco's help. Reiner eased him down into the bed, and swept his hair off his forehead to check his temperature. He was freezing, and sweat slicked, but his breathing was steady, and the bandages weren't getting any darker.

Marco lingered in the door way, biting his lip, and looking around nervously. He looked out of place dressed in all black like he was, chest, and legs strapped with weapons, his bow slung over his back.

Annie had talked Eren down. Calmed him, and eased him into a chair in the kitchen so that he could work through whatever it was that had him so addled. Jean was the one who they tasked with finding Armin and Mikasa, assuming he would be responsible with his own kind. Reiner listened as he moved through the gas station. He heard Annie's bedroom door open, and Mikasa's voice speaking softly.

"I'm fine- No he didn't bite anyone- I'm worried about Armin."

"Where is he?" Jean asked.

"Under the blankets. He's very photo sensitive, and there are just too many windows."

Reiner stopped listening, turning his attention back to Bert. "You mind leaving?" he asked Marco. "I need to warm him up, and no offense, but I'd rather not have to lie down with you so close."

He saw Marco nod out of his peripherals. "I'll go help Annie," he said softly. "I think Jean's got everything under control."

Reiner watched the door close before he stripped Bertholdt of his clothing, and pushed the cots together. He piled all the dirty clothes by the door, including his own, dropping the weapons still in their holsters beside them, and climbed under the covers to wrap himself around the other boy. Healing took care when things got too bad. Touching could help. Calm, safe contact, and warmth.

His mother had told him that when he was young, and his father had been gored in the stomach by a wild boar on a hunting trip. She'd done the same thing then, tucking him into bed, and wrapping her body around his.

He cradled Bert's head against his chest, and took a deep breath. Cauterizing the wound wasn't really an option because it might burn the artery shut, cutting off the blood supply to Bert's brain. He couldn't stitch it for the same reasons. This would be something he just had to wait out. Bert felt unnaturally cold, and still. He was normally such an active sleeper, but now he lay like a rock, his shallow breaths the only thing that moved him.

The worry in Reiner's stomach was like an all encompassing pit, that tried to suck him deep down into it, but he didn't let it. He thought instead about possibilities, and tomorrows, using the future to darn the potential threat of loss.

They would go home together, and bring Eren with them to be with his own kind. They would be rewarded for that, and maybe it would be enough of a deed for everyone to overlook their obvious malfunction. Maybe then they wouldn't have to lie, and settle down with women they didn't love in separate houses, and have children by them in a farce of a life.

He fell asleep to those thoughts at some point, Bert warming slowly in his arms, breaths becoming stronger, and more steady as time went by.

When he woke again, the sun was setting, and Bertholdt was a damp inferno beside him, sweating to try and cool his body against Reiner's skin. He peeked beneath the bandages, and found that all that remained of the bullet holes were a couple of pink scars.

They'd had a lot of close calls in the last twenty four hours. Too many. He pulled himself from bed with that thought, and slipped into a pair of jeans before he found his way to the kitchen. Eren was sitting with Jean and Marco at the table as Annie leaned up against the counter beside Armin. Mikasa separated herself out from the group by pacing, watching everything like a hawk. Jean and Marco were still dressed in their dirty, blood stained hunting gear. Likewise, Annie had foregone changing.

Reiner's entrance brought everyone's attention to him, and broke the silence with the sound of unoiled door hinges.

"Morning," he said jokingly as an attempt to lighten the mood. Both Annie, and Mikasa glared. He coughed into his hand awkwardly at that. "Bert's doing better now. He's definitely gonna make it." That at least eased Annie. "He's still sleeping though, so I ain't gonna wake him."

"So what's up with y'all?" he asked finally.

"Eren's going to murder every last werewolf in existence," Annie said matter-of-factly.

Reiner gaped at her, and then the small boy at the table. That statement raised a number of questions. Chiefly whether or not Eren knew about them.


	12. Chapter 12

"That's ridiculous," Reiner said.

"The fact that werewolves exist, or the fact that I'm going to kill them all?" Eren asked.

"You can't just kill an entire species. You're a thirteen-year-old-boy."

Armin agreed wholeheartedly with Reiner's assessment.

"Besides," Reiner continued. "How can you hold them all accountable for the actions of just a few?"

Eren glared at the wood grain of the table, face twisting, and hands balling into fists. He always had hated being presented with logical arguments.

"Does every werewolf account for you?" Annie asked softly. Eren twitched visibly. "More importantly, because I doubt that you've thought that one through, does it account for us?"

Oh. That was why. That was why they smelled different. That was why they had raised the hair on the back of Armin's neck when he'd first met them. That was why the smell of the Yeager house after the attack had reminded him so much of the gas station.

Eren stared at them blankly.

"Well?" Annie prompted. "Does it?"

His jaw worked as if he was trying to say something, but nothing would come out.

"Because you're a new turn. You're a puppy who's got no control over himself. You're gonna need us in order to get anywhere. Even Mikasa knows that," Annie said with a small toss of her head to indicate Mikasa across the table. Mikasa's glare deepened. She was not fond of Annie. Armin got the feeling it was a mutual not-fondness.

The air in the room was cold, and yet, Reiner was standing there without a shirt, seeming to radiate heat like he'd been made of fire. Armin bit his tongue to keep from mentioning the boy's complete lack of upper body clothing. The werewolf shifted where he was leaning against the wall, and took a step toward the table.

"So clearly we need to talk," he said softly as he took a seat. "We need to talk about training, and about fighting," though he was talking to Eren, Reiner looked quite pointedly at Jean, and Marco when he said "fighting".

"I don't need to be trained," Eren said stubbornly.

"Well then, have fun being taken in by the government, and experimented on to see how you bitchin' tick, I'm cool with it, less work for me!" Reiner said to the ceiling. His point hit home like a jackhammer trying to cut a loaf of bread. Eren sneered at the table, but held his tongue.

"You live here now," Reiner said. "You tell us when you leave, and you listen when we tell you shit, because it's important, and I ain't bitchin' around here. We're not all bad, and I'll show you, by givin' you the ability to hunt down the guys that are." Reiner paused then, sitting back in his chair a bit, "And because these carrion beasts over here owe us big time, they're gonna help out by telling us everything they know about hunting wolves."

Eren's eyes went wide as he looked up at Reiner, and then over at Jean, and Marco. Jean groaned, but Marco shrugged.

"Sounds fair, I guess," the boy said.

"Dose that mean they're staying here too?" Annie asked. "Because we are way over full."

"Nah," Marco said. "We'll be fine at the motel."

Armin swallowed, and tried not to think about the possible consequences of living beside a pack of werewolves, and a couple of hunters on a day to day basis. It didn't seem like a good idea. He pressed his tongue up against his teeth, and tried to imagine them all getting along.

He didn't get very far. Perhaps it was that his imagination was limited, but none of it seemed plausible. Reiner was doling out orders though, and he remembered that in captivity wolves began to display Alpha and Omega dynamics, while in the wild they lived in family packs lead by a mated pair.

There were three wolves in Reiner's pack, which left three slots to fill. Reiner seemed to take on the position of Alpha which placed Annie in the middle, and Bert as the lowest peg on the totem pole. Where did that put Eren?

The unknown. The Gamma wolf. Armin looked at his best friend, acutely aware of the whole room, and the rooms beyond. He could feel the hallway, and the beating of Bertholdt's heart where he lay in bed. Reiner had left an imprint of scent, and feeling beside the other boy.

Everything tasted like fear, and relief, and nervous excitement for some impending doom. Dread filled every mason jar on the shelf, and ate through every wall to create it's own little mouse holes. Armin pressed his lips together, and swallowed. All the errant emotion was starting to get to him. He wanted to lie down, and be away from it all. He hadn't had a proper dark room that day, and so he was particularly exhausted.

Eren set his head down on the table heavily as Reiner spoke in barely hospitable tones with Jean. Annie watched impatiently.

"It's time to eat," she said in the middle of Jean saying something that sounded slightly slanted against supernatural beings. "And ain't nobody done the hunting because you fucks decided we were a threat for no fuckin' reason. Go to a human place, and get us human food, and pay for it with your money because it sure as hell ain't gonna be ours."

Jean and Marco looked at her incredulously until Mikasa leaned over the backs of their chairs, head sliding between theirs. "I'm hungry," she said softly. "Don't make me ask too."

There wasn't a question posed after that, and after hunting the great and mighty burger, Jean and Marco brought home a feast upon which they all gorged themselves.

Bertholdt didn't wake up to eat though, and Reiner fretted over it for a good thirty minutes before running outside to catch something.

Jean and Marco left before he got back with a quail in his hand, it's neck bent at an odd angle. They sat in the kitchen in silence as he plucked the bird, and cleaned the meat to make a broth.

Armin watched every movement, committing them to memory. He had a burning desire in the pit of his stomach to know. It was one that had been there before, but with the developments of the night, Armin was even more thirsty for information about where they came from, how they lived, what their customs were.

He didn't ask Reiner though. Reiner wasn't in the kind of place to be able to tell him right then. He was busy fretting over his boyfriend. Armin didn't blame him. He wasn't even romantically interested in Eren or Mikasa, and he still knew he'd be in the same state if something had happened to them.

The silence seemed never ending though, so Armin pushed himself up to his feet, and said his goodbyes before pushing out the kitchen door, and beginning the long walk home. He was surprised when about a quarter mile from the gas station he ran into Jean and Marco again.

The two boys were standing by a bush just out of the cone of light a street lamp provided, speaking in hushed tones. Commiserating over the situation. Armin tasted the air, and found annoyance, and irritation hanging around the couple.

"There isn't even any game," Jean said softly.

"There's the haunted manor about seventy miles from here," Armin supplied, watching them jump. "You could look into that."

Jean relaxed a bit, but Marco watched him warily.

"I'm on my way home," Armin said in order to explain himself. "I didn't expect to see you here, I promise."

"It's cool," Jean said. "You wanna tell us more about the haunting?"

Armin shrugged. There wasn't really much to tell other than word of mouth, and who knew how much that had gotten around. "It's just an urban myth," he said. "But there's a plantation, relatively close for a plantation I guess. Must not be a big one because it would be in the foothills instead of on flat land, but anyway, it's kind of close, and everyone says it's haunted."

"Are there any stories about it?" Jean prodded.

Armin shrugged again. "I don't know really, but apparently no one has been able to actually get inside for the last twenty years or something. Like they said the building was condemned, and the government tried to tear it down, but stuff just kept going wrong. It's where most of it stems from, I think."

Marco looked unimpressed.

"This is a small town," Armin defended. "We don't have many stories, okay?"

"We can check it out," Jean said. "We haven't got much else to do."

"I have no idea what I'm supposed to tell my dad about all this," Marco said.

Armin offered him an awkward smile before stepping past them. "Sorry," he said. "It's the best I've got, and now I need to get home so I can blog. My people need me."

"By people he means nerds," he heard Jean say jokingly as he turned around, and continued walking. He smiled to himself, and tried to ignore the fact that passing them, he'd gotten a sudden, stomach gripping hunger that had no reason to be there.


	13. Chapter 13

Eren woke up early that morning shivering, and looked around the room in the low light, eyes catching on Reiner's form sitting on the floor with his head bowed forward onto the cot he shared with Bert. Eren didn't need to ask to know that the other boy was asleep. The knowledge was a feeling in his gut that he didn't need to question.

He slid his legs out of the bed, bare feet curling against the cold wood of the floor. Reiner's shoulder jumped, head turning slightly. Eren watched the gold of his eyes as they cracked open, and stared into him.

"Morning," Eren said.

Reiner shrugged slightly, and sat up fully, back popping into alignment as he stretched. Eren looked abruptly to the door, wondering if Reiner would stop him. The other boy stood up, hand ghosting over Bertholdt's face as he turned.

"You want breakfast?" he asked.

Eren nodded.

The sun was rising outside, and the kitchen's one window allowed it's light to shaft in through the crinoline curtain and pool on the floor. Everything was sort of blue. It made Reiner's skin look like Armin's did when he pulled a pan down out of the cabinet, and cracked little, freckled eggs into it. Eren had never seen eggs like that before.

Reiner scrambled them, and dumped helpings out onto plates before setting one down in front of Eren, and going around to knock on doors.

Bert didn't join them, and Eren wondered if he'd woken up yet. Reiner seemed subdued enough that it was likely he hadn't. Mikasa sat next to him, across from Annie, and they stared silently at one another as they ate. It smelled angry and sad in the room as the sun rose, and the light lost it's blue tint for a golden one.

Reiner cleaned their plates when they'd finished, and holed himself back up in his room with Bert, leaving Annie to watch over Eren.

Eren listened to the world, tried to stretch his ears, and monitor Bert's breathing. He didn't know what to do with himself. He still wanted to hold true to his own ambitions, and yet he had no animosity toward any of the wolves here. They'd saved his life, and helped him when he needed it.

It made him feel sick and confused as he curled up in a chair by the kitchen's window, and listened to Reiner take care of Bert.

Annie told him to stay there. That she'd be listening, and knowing everything he knew about her, he understood that that meant he didn't have the option to leave. Mikasa dealt him a few hands of go fish, but he wasn't very interested in playing.

At around noon, Annie handed him a broom, and told him to sweep the floors. It gave him a distraction for a while, but when it was done he found himself back in the kitchen, lazing around.

"Dust the shelves," she told him.

She had Mikasa sweep the tarmac outside, and take out the trash. They checked the neon in the sign, and did all the things Bert and Reiner would have normally done. She taught them a few dice games during lulls where they didn't have any customers, and explained how the cash register worked.

Eren enjoyed it. She was a bit gruff, but that didn't mean she was entirely un-personable. She made him laugh in weird little ways. It was similar to the ways that Mikasa made him laugh.

Reiner came out again for dinner, seeming a bit less depressed than he had that morning. Eren listened in, and heard Bert puttering around the room, breathing calmly. It eased nerves that he didn't know were frayed, and sat right in his stomach.

Bert joined them, with fading bruises on his shoulders beneath the collar of his shirt that made Eren wonder what the he and Reiner had been up to while he and Mikasa were out maintaining things. Annie didn't say anything about it. Likewise, Mikasa was more interested in the food than any interpersonal relationship between werewolves.

Reiner spoke animatedly, as if her was hugely relieved by Bert being alright.

"I was plannin' to send a missive up the mountain about the attack," Reiner said when Annie mentioned the fight. "I thought perhaps the elders would have input on our actions surroundin' the incident. Not to mention I think they prefer to know about hunter attacks, and proximity."

Annie nodded thoughtfully at that, and Eren was left to sit wondering about the whole thing. He'd been terrified after the bite. Things had changed so quickly, and been so painful, and loud, but now the fear was gone. There was just curiosity now. He wanted to know what it was like where they came from.

Would he be accepted there?

"I'll help you write it up," Bert said to his plate. He was stirring his peas into his rice.

"Yeah, I'll probably need that," Reiner said. "Hey, is Armin comin' over to hang out with the two of you tonight?" he asked then, changing the subject entirely.

Mikasa shrugged. "I don't really know," Eren said. "He didn't say anything about it."

"Alright," Reiner said, twisting a bit of duck meat away from the rest of the strip he had on his plate. "I'm gonna go'n check up on those two shit starters after dinner."

"Plannin' to go alone?" Annie asked.

"Yeah," Reiner said around a bite of food. "I'm not really too keen on anybody else gettin' the whip."

"Maybe we're not too keen on you gettin' it," she suggested it.

"I'll be fine."

"Suit yourself, but don't make Bert worry."

From the way Reiner's face twitched into anger, Eren assumed this was the basic gist of a lot of the conversations they had.

Reiner did leave after dinner, he slipped into a holster, and a heavy jacket before walking out the door. He left Bert sitting at the window looking worried, and smelling nervous.


	14. Chapter 14

The motel smelled like them just as much as it smelled like cheap sex. Reiner's nose wrinkled as he stretched to focus his ears in on conversations, attempting to tell where they were. He carded through conversations about sex, an older man having an orgasm, and a married couple arguing about their failing relationship before he found them.

"-We'll drive out tomorrow," Marco said, and Reiner noted the sound of shuffling papers as he honed in on their room.

"What time?" Jean asked.

"Sunrise. To be honest, if there is a haunting I don't really want to be dealing with it at night, and it's a deserted building so I have the luxury of choosing a time that isn't the dead of night."

"That's legit."

Reiner knocked then, and waited as the sound of shuffling papers intensified for a moment. Jean answered the door, pulling it open a crack, and staring directly into Reiner's chest. "Oh," was all the input he had.

"Let me in," Reiner said as Marco asked who it was.

Jean stood back, and let him in. Reiner tracked Marco squaring up where he stood between the beds.

"What are you two skin boys plotting now?"

"None of your business," Marco said.

"Skin boys?" Jean asked.

"Humans," Reiner answered, "and no voice to it bein' none of my business. We have a fuckin' deal."

"That's got no bearing on this, to be honest," Marco said, picking a pile of pages off the bed, and dumping them into the night stand drawer.

"And how's that?" Reiner asked.

"It's just a little investigation."

"You promised to take Eren with you on your little investigations. You're going tomorrow? We're going with you."

Marco bit his lip, and looked at Jean. Jean shrugged.

"Are you fucking serious right now?" Marco asked. Jean looked half repentant as he slid a hand up to run through the shaved-short hair on the back of his head.

"I don't know. It's a simple case, right? These are the kinds of things you and your dad started me on."

Marco wavered then, shuffling his feet back, and forth as he thought. "Yeah," he said, looking at the bed farthest from Reiner. "Yeah, that's true, but Eren's still-"

"Still what?" Reiner interrupted, tucking his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

"Coming to terms the whole werewolf thing. Wouldn't it be a bit much?"

Reiner thought about it, looking up at the spot lights in the ceiling, and taking in how bright they were boring down into the room. Eren was still dealing with all that, true, but what he really needed was a distraction, and with Bert still dealing with the after effects of healing, and needing to keep most of the pack at the gas station, they couldn't give him instruction yet.

They could take a day, every now and then, but they couldn't close down for good. The gas station's funds were important to the village, and they needed to be able to send a steady amount up the mountain every month. Bert needed to be better in order for them to teach Eren their ways properly. But they could take one day off, all of them, and investigate whatever smell the hunters had caught wind of together.

"We'll come with you tomorrow," Reiner said.

Marco, and Jean both balked to the decision simultaneously. Reiner raised a single eyebrow at them as they shouted things that carried no real voice, and meant as little to him as the forty-fifth flower of spring.

"It's final," Reiner said.

"Oh big mister alpha, all confident with everything figured out," Jean snarked. Reiner gave him a chuckle, crossing his arms over his chest.

"Do you know who first observed alpha/beta dynamics?" he asked. Jean shrugged. "Humans," he said. "Though it's true that we've adopted the terms into our vocabulary, humans were the ones to first apply them. A human named Schenkel was the one who did it in a book called "Expressions Studies On Wolves" which was a culmination of all of his studies on wolves. The wolves themselves, however, were in captivity. Do you know how wolves live in captivity?"

"How?" Jean asked as though he were done listening to Reiner talk about anything.

"They live with in direct opposition to the way they live in the wild with wolves they ain't related to or mated with. In the wild, two wolves, or a mated pair start fuckin', and they form a family group, or a pack. The little ones grow up big, and go out on their own where they find a bitch, or a dog, and they make themselves a new pack just like mommy and daddy did way back when. Now our society works a little different because we ain't exactly wolves, now are we?"

"That goes without fucking saying."

"So what we do is we have mommy, and daddy wolf make a happy little family, and then we find friends our age who we're raised with until we're fifteen. We're packed up would be the proper terminology. We do everythin' with our pack. We're taught to fight with them, and hunt with them. We sleep and eat with them. They are our family just as much as our blood is. Then, when we're fifteen our parents, and our elders kick us out of the den, and we come tumbling down the hill. We live alone with you shits for two years, and that is the only time that alpha," he motioned to himself to put emphasis on the word, "ever has voice in our worlds. It is the only time it will ever matter."

"What relevance does this have?" Marco asked.

"I told you that in return for teaching Eren, and us, how you bitches do what you do we'd tell you 'bout us. Well you been told. You ain't got a bitchin' say in whether or not we tag along, now do you?"

Jean snarled at him.

Reiner gave him another chuckle, and pointed at him with both hands. "Now you're gettin' into the spirit, skin boy! That's how the wolves do!"

"Get the fuck out of here, Reiner," he hissed.

"I'll see you in the morning," he said as he put his hand on the door handle. "We'll be here first thing."

"Are you gonna let this happen?" he heard Jean ask once the door had closed behind him.

"We'll leave before they can get here," Marco replied.

Reiner laughed to himself softly. No they wouldn't.

The next morning, he shook his pack out of their beds, and bundled Armin in sweaters, and scarves to keep him out of the sun long before the dawn had broken over town. He had them trot over to the motel, and wake Jean and Marco up by banging on the door.

They answered in their underpants with wide, bleary eyes, swearing into the misty air as the sky began to lighten barely above the hills.

"Morning sunshine," Reiner said, leaning up against the door jam. "You both ready to roll?"

"You're not all going to fit in the car," he said.

Bert shrugged a single shoulder. "If you find me a car that was made before the turn of the century I c'n fix that problem," he said.

Marco's eyes widened for a moment. "No. We are not committing grand theft auto, do you think this is a video game?" he asked. "Fuck it, we'll all fit in the car. It'll just be uncomfortable."

"Put me in the trunk," Annie said. I'll fit.

"Where'll we put the guns?" Jean asked.

"You think I never slept on a bed of weaponry?"

She didn't win that argument. Instead they put the back seats down so that it was a clear shot through, and had them curl up side by side in the back. It was still uncomfortable, but less so. Armin hid in the back as far away from the sun as he could, saying it hurt his head, and Reiner sat with his back up against the driver's seat. Bert mirrored him on the passenger's side. Between them, Annie, Eren, and Mikasa swam in a free form pile, often elbowing each other.

Reiner found it horribly amusing to watch the two girls go at one another off and on.

As they drove, Marco had Jean explain all of the information they'd gathered.

"The plantation was built by the Smith family at the beginning of the Antebellum era. They owned it up until the early thirties when the scion of the time Erwin Smith VII, I know, moved up North for business opportunities. Before he left though, one of his staff members, one Petra Ral, died in a horrible accident. It's not specified what the accident was, just that it was of a particularly barbaric nature. It was suggested that maybe that was the real reason he hit the road, but no one ever really knew."

"How'd you come across all that?" Armin asked.

"Old papers in the library."

"Oh man, I should have thought of that."

Jean smiled, something that Reiner only just caught out of the corner of his eye. "Well, the Manor of the plantation has been surrounded by rumors of hauntings ever since it was abandoned. Reports of people being frightened away. No one's owned it since because people were always scared away upon showing up. They tried to tear it down twenty years ago, like you said, Armin, but it didn't go anywhere. There were eight deaths during the attempt, but not a single hair on that old house's head was even touched. Teenagers have been crawling all over it since then. There have been about fourteen missing persons reports related to the place, but no further confirmed deaths."

They made it there by nine o'clock, and Reiner looked out the window up at the old house. It was bone white, and covered in overgrowth, but better maintained than he'd expected for a place that had been abandoned for more than half a century. It gave him a bad feeling deep in his gut. He didn't like the way it smelled. He ignored it, though, as they got out and stretched their legs.

Armin stayed huddled in the trunk, until Jean popped it open.

"You okay?" Reiner heard the boy ask as he loaded rock salt into a rifle.

"I'm not going in there," Armin said, voice small. "I'm not going in there, and neither are you."

Reiner turned around, and saw Armin's face paler than he'd ever seen it, in the sun. His eyes were wide, the blue of his irises looking glassy when they darted about frantically.

"What's the matter?" Eren asked.

"I don't like it. It's not happening," Armin insisted.

Reiner took a deep breath, and tasted the air. He didn't like the place either, but that didn't mean there was a threat.

Shakily, Armin climbed out of the trunk, skin pinking almost instantly the minute he was exposed to the light. "We need to go home," he begged, clutching Jean's sleeve.

They all stared, at a loss for what to say.

"It'll be fine," Jean said.

They strapped up then, iron and salt in all the weaponry they had, and trotted up the stairs of the porch. Marco pushed the door open, and it flowed out all at once, rolling over them like a wave rolled over the shore, deep, and dark, and painful.


	15. Chapter 15

The duffel bag hit the table with a huge woofing sound.

Levi jumped, pulling his book away from it as quickly as he could. "Where are you going?" he asked as Erwin turned gracefully away to the living room.

"There appears to be one of our own on the grounds of the Plantation," he said without looking back.

Levi stood up, keeping his page by closing the book around his index finger. "Who says?"

"Hange," Erwin said, pulling a couple of books off a high shelf. Levi glared at his hands as they stacked "A Guide To Diplomacy" and "The Average Almanac Of All Things Undead" atop one another.

"And how does Hange know something like that?"

"She's a witch. How would she not know?"

"Did it trip the wards?"

"Of course it tripped the wards. That's what the wards were set to monitor. You see, we as a species are wont to fall out of being up on current events. Perhaps one of us wanted to contact me, and didn't know I'd left the south?"

"That's fucking stupid, Erwin," Levi said, hurrying after him as he walked briskly back to the dining room table, and tucked the books into the duffel bag.

"Regardless, we need to go."

"What if it's a false alarm?"

"Not a risk I can take."

"No one's tried to contact you at The Wings for over fifty years. It was a rather fucking publicized event that you'd left it."

"Afraid to face your mistakes, Levi?" Erwin asked, fixing him with a look that saw right through his bullshit.

Levi took a deep breath through his nose, and pushed it out slowly the way it had come, nostrils flaring. He could feel Erwin's calculating emotions, controlled, and precise ticking away in his chest, making silent points, and stabbing ethereal knives into delicate sections of long festering wounds.

"That's not it," he said.

"Don't lie to me, you're horrible at it," Erwin said. "Pack yourself up, Levi. We're going on an unplanned business trip."

"You're a piece of shit," he hissed through his teeth.

"I take pride in it," Erwin boasted, sweeping out of the room.

"Die in a fuck hole!"

"No thank you!"

Levi sat back down at the table, and hid his face in his hands, trying not to think about home. It had been so long since they'd gone to the place he'd been born. He didn't want to go back, but he didn't have a choice. He groaned, and dropped his book, forgetting his place among the pages.

"Shit," he hissed. "Shit, fuck."


	16. Chapter 16

Armin couldn't breathe. He could hardly look through the door. Something was wrong. He wanted to hurl. There was a pit, something deep, and horrible. Some sort of depression, it had to be, but it was nothing like he'd ever felt before.

He grabbed hold of both Jean and Marco, and planted his feet. Mikasa and Eren balked behind him.

"Hey, Armin you gotta get out of the sun," Eren said.

In front of them, Reiner and Bert had also stopped dead in their tracks. Armin felt like he could see the hints of canine features around the corners of their faces when he wasn't quite looking at them.

The sucking feeling was something sudden, surging up the way the first wave had almost as if it was in direct response to the sudden shift in pressure. They went tumbling through into the parlor, sprawling on the ground, feeling in the dark and the confusion for their weapons.

Why had Armin wanted to come? Why had he ever even thought it would be a good idea? He'd wanted to be there with Eren and Mikasa. He hadn't wanted to be left behind, but now he didn't know if that was so true. Maybe being left was better than this.

He sat up, and curled around himself. He didn't realize he was screaming until Reiner was shaking him, a whine in his voice as he asked what was wrong.

"I think we might have misjudged," Marco said.

"Is that all you bitches do?" Reiner asked loudly.

Armin noticed that it had just gone quiet, as if some loud pounding sound had been assuaged, and he looked up to see Jean, and Marco both with their hands braced against the door.

"It's not going to budge," Jean said.

Armin tried to take a deep breath, hands sweaty on the rifle he'd been given, as he looked around the room.

It was large, and open, and sweeping like something people saw in movies. There was a grand staircase that was headed with a delicate little balcony.

She was standing there, wreathed in the washed out colors of the wall paper, running her hand along the rail.

He felt the group slowly notice what they were seeing as well.

"We definitely misjudged," Marco said when his eyes fixed on her, and the way she seemed to fade out ethereally at the edges like she was submerged in water.

Her eyes were slow in turning to them. "You didn't knock," she said.

"What does she want?" Reiner asked, bolstering. He lifted his rifle, but Armin stopped him.

"But you came in anyway," she continued. Armin was astounded by the lack of southern accent in her speech. Clearly she had come from the north. Maybe somewhere in Chicago. "And now you point guns at me."

Her anger radiated out from her, pushing through Armin the way a punch would.

"We're trespassing," he said, trying to regain the air she'd robbed him of with that last one.

"So you noticed?" she asked.

Armin nodded. "We need to leave," he continued.

"No."

The room went darker as window shutters slammed shut around them, and she pulled her hand daintily from the railing, turning, and trailing away.

"We're fucked," Jean said. "We need to find the motivation," he said, turning to Marco.

"Seems like we set her off by opening the door without asking for proper permission. That's territorial behavior. She's already pissed, it would be simplest if we could find a way to pacify her. We need to apologize."

"Apologize?" Reiner asked, standing back up, and rounding on the other boy. "How is that going to help our situation?"

"Ghosts work on creeds, and codes. Apologizing would soothe her so we could help."

"Help?"

"That's the whole point!" Marco yelled. "It's the whole point of doing any of this! We're here to help people. It's not her fault something horrible happened, and she got caught here. It's not her fault that she can't leave on her own, so we're here to help."

"What if she doesn't want to leave?" Bertholdt asked quietly. "There are those who die that stay behind with purpose. What if she still has a purpose, and duty she thinks she needs to fulfill?"

There was a moment of silence. Armin felt Eren and Mikasa breathing behind him. And her. He felt her like a dark pit in the center of the place.

"Wouldn't it be cruel to disallow her to see her mission through to the end?"

"Regardless, at this point she's hurting others," Marco said. "I doubt she would have wanted to do that before she died."

"How do you know?" Annie asked. "You didn't know her."

"Let's just try to make contact, and apologize," he said.

"Isn't that like the last thing we want? Don't we want to be as far away from her as possible?"

They rounded on Mikasa, sitting on the floor next to Eren, holding his shoulder in her hand as though to comfort him though he didn't look like he really needed it. Armin groaned.

"Can we be quiet for a bit?" he asked. "We need to work together for one. If we're all working toward the same goal this will be a lot easier." Marco, and Reiner both nodded with him. "Dividing up the group based on skills, you've got the four werewolves who can see in the dark, hear and smell much better than humans, and shapeshift. We've got the two hunters who are experienced in dealing with these kinds of threats. We've got Mikasa who can take any physical fight, and then we've got me, and I'm honestly not good for much. Is that right?" He glanced around the party, looking into their solemn faces, and trying to read them through the overwhelming weight of the ghost's emotions.

"I want everyone to have a werewolf buddy. Mikasa and Eren can work together because anything Eren can't do she'll be able to, and they know each other well. Reiner can work with Jean because they don't like each other but he doesn't have as much of a problem with Jean as he does with Marco." Marco glared at him. "It's what happens when you shoot someone's boyfriend," Armin defended. "Which means Marco and Bertholdt will be together. Leaving Annie with me. Sorry Annie," he added. She shrugged non committaly as if the whole situation was beneath her. "Ideally, if anything happens you stay with your buddy, okay?" They nodded, and he took a deep breath.

"Now what we need to do first and foremost is survive. We can't do shit if we don't survive. Does anyone have input?" he asked.

Marco raised a hand off the barrel of his rifle. "I'd just like to put in that Ghosts tend to gain power at night. I don't really know why that happens, but we need to get out of here by then because it'll just be that much worse after sun down."

"Sure," Armin said. "Now what's the plan?"

It turned out Jean was the plan guy. Marco knew the facts, and he knew them really well, but he preferred to trust Jean in figuring out what to do with them. Jean crouched down next to him on the floor and explained that the best way to forcibly move a spirit along to whatever was next was to cleanse their body. This could be done in a number of ways, but the best were submerging it in sanctified water- something deemed inefficient- salting the bones, and fire. If all of that failed there was always the good, old fashioned exorcism, but that tended to just shunt the spirit to somewhere else.

"What supplies do we have?" Armin asked when the options had been laid out.

Everyone had a rifle packed to the teeth with rock salt, an iron weapon of some sort, and something sanctified. They also had a full three sacks of salt that seemed to be about a pound each.

"What's this?" Armin asked, picking up a book Marco had laid down.

"Think of it like a supernatural cheat book. We're going out on our own. My father sent us with a bit of aid."

"That's perfect, Marco, thank you," Armin said, picking up the book. "Can I borrow it? I promise not to let it get hurt."

"Sure."

"And what's this?"

"Looks like a holy symbol."

"A what?"

"Do you play DnD?" Jean asked. Everyone but Marco fixed him with an odd look. "Whatever," he said as Marco began to look embarrassed with him. "There's a game mechanic in most RPGs where the cleric uses a holy symbol. It's like a power item. So long as you believe in it, it protects you."

"Really?" Reiner asked, reaching out to touch it.

"In theory," Jean replied.

"Does anything here actually work?" was Reiner's very exasperated response.

"Salt," Marco said, shoving a bag into the werewolf's chest.

"No one is alone ever," Armin said. "I don't care what happens, or if you hate each other, we end up separated, and you stick together."

The group nodded.

"Now what's our first course of action? We have two options. We can try to cleanse her by dealing with her body or exorcising her, or we can try to reason with her and apologize."

"I'm for moving her on," Reiner said. Annie and Mikasa were with him, but Bertholdt and Eren sided with Marco and Jean.

"How do we do this?" Armin asked Marco.

"We need to set up a ritual space." Reiner looked at him as though he were speaking in tongues.

"Wait, you're doing magic?" he asked.

"Yeah," Marco said. "Is there a problem?"

The three original pack members looked uncomfortable. Bertholdt said something that was too quiet for anyone else to hear, and Reiner nodded. "No," he decided. "No, it's fine."

Marco instructed Armin to open the book to a page titled "Evocation" and drew a circle out of salt on the ground. Upon his insistence, they stepped inside it, and sat on the floor facing outward in along it's perimeter, and joined hands.

"I'm gonna read, asking her to join us here, she'll show up. No one leaves the circle. The salt will protect us because it's pure, and she's got some issues right now, but the minute you're out of the circle you're toast," Marco said. "This isn't too fancy. We don't have the sort of things we would need to bind her to an object, and even then, I don't think we'd have the ability, so I'm keeping it simple, okay? She'll pick one of us to speak to. Let her. Be polite, and respectful."

He read then, and Armin squeezed the hands in his as the feeling of her swelled around them. She came together like wisps sitting before him, mirroring his position. He looked into her eyes, and his gut churned horribly.

"Why?" she asked.

"Why what?" Armin felt Eren jump through the connection of their hands. Clearly the other boy hadn't noticed that she'd already chosen.

"Why are you bothering me?"

"We want to help," Armin said. "You're in pain, right?"

"A soldier must stand through any pain," she said, the conviction bleeding through her form, righting her posture. "I need to wait for my captain to come back."

"Your captain's dead," Armin tried to explain. He regretted it instantly. She flickered, skidded through being visible to being not, and back again, face flying into a rage, pretty eyes narrowing.

She didn't say anything. Instead she screamed. Eren, and Jean's hands tightened on his, and he closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. "You're dead too," he said. She screamed again even louder, hands fisting against the floor boards, and making them swell beneath her. The salt shifted, and the wood split open.


End file.
